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FUNDAMENTAL 
RELIGIOUS TEACHINGS 

OF 

CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 

THEIR LOGICAL AND ACTUAL 
OUTCOME IN LIFE 

BY 

CHARLES WALLACE McCASKILL 

Pastor Methodist Episcopal Church, University Place, Nebraska 



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PRINTED FOR THE AUTHOR 
1916 



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Copyright, 19 16, by 
CHARLES WALLACE McCASKILL 



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DEC 20 1916 

©CI.A453178 

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CONTENTS 

chapter page 

Introduction 5 

Part I. Fundamental Doctrines and Teachings 

of Christian Science 

I. An Understanding of these Fundamental Doctrines 

Necessary 1 1 

II. Difficulty on Account of Unclearness and Confusion . . 20 

III. Real Fundamental Beliefs on which the System is 

Based 24 

IV. Christian Science Doctrine of Salvation 44 

V. Christian Science Philosophy . 51 

VI. Some Claims Blasphemous 59 

Part II. Christian Science Healing System 

I. Its Claim to be a Revival of Apostolic Divine Healing . 69 
II. Underlying Principles Different from those of Christ 

and the Early Church 72 

III. Different Mode of Healing 89 

IV. Different Kind of Diseases Healed 91 

V. Different Spirit and Motive 98 

Part III. Logical and Actual Results of These 
Beliefs and Teachings on Life 

I. Lead Away from True Religious Worship 107 

II. Lead Toward Life of Dishonesty 112 

III. Tend to Destroy Sympathetic, Compassionate Feel- 

ings Toward Suffering Humanity 12 i 

IV. Take away the Basis for Moral Living 125 

V. Lessen the Sacredness of Home 133 

VI. If Really Believed, would Destroy Interest in Na- 
ture and Desire for Knowledge 141 

VII. Tend toward Worst Form of Witchcraft 153 

VIII. How Account for its Numerous Followers — their 

Good Lives, Intelligence? 158 

Part IV. Was the Life and Spirit of the Founder 

of Christian Science in Harmony with the 

Life and Spirit of Jesus Christ? 

I. Short Biography of Mrs. Eddy 175 

II. Should Mrs. Eddy and Her Teachings be Substi- 
tuted for Jesus Christ and the Bible? 181 



INTRODUCTION 

This book upon the subject of Christian Science is 
written not for the sake of saying sensational things. 
It is written not to make light or sport of anyone's 
religious belief. It is assumed that the great mass 
of people who follow any religious belief are honest 
and sincere in that belief. What is said, therefore, 
is said in all earnestness because the writer feels it 
his duty as a Christian minister. This book is not 
written with the hope of changing any large number 
of Christian Science adherents or of leading them 
to give up their doctrines. There is little or no hope 
of that. Christian Scientists are discouraged from 
reading or hearing anything that in any way reflects 
upon or argues against their beliefs. They are taught 
that all such books or articles or addresses are the 
result of blind prejudice and bias or else of a mis- 
understanding of their doctrines. The majority of 
Christian Scientists do not examine for themselves 
to find out the real underlying conceptions of Chris- 
tian Science, and they are not willing to consider 
or weigh the force of any statement or argument made 
by others who have so examined, if that statement or 
argument is in any way opposed to Christian Science. 
5 



6 INTRODUCTION 

Hence it is not probable that any large number of them 
will be affected by any book or argument or state- 
ment of facts coming from an outsider. 

This book is written for two reasons : First, because 
it is believed that there are a great many people, some 
of them already more or less inclined toward Chris- 
tian Science, who do not really know what Christian 
Science is in its fundamental teachings, nor what the 
logical and necessary outcome of such teachings must 
be in the lives of those who believe and follow them. 
They ought to know, and it is believed that if they 
did know, many of them would never go into it. In 
the second place, this book is written with the hope 
of leading some of the Christian ministers, who may 
not have done so before, to see that it is their duty, 
in every way possible, to enlighten their people as to 
the actual nature, teachings, and necessary outcome 
of this pretended Christian movement before it has 
secured its hold upon them. 

The author realizes that many other books and 
pamphlets have been written upon the subject of 
Christian Science, and he hesitates to add another to 
this list. However, after examining a large number 
of these he has not found any that seem to him to 
set forth the fundamental religious beliefs and teach- 
ings of Christian Science and their necessary and 
actual outcome in the lives of those who accept them 
in such full, systematic, and yet simple way, and 



INTRODUCTION 7 

with such large number of page and line quotations 
from the acknowledged text-book of Christian 
Science, as to carry conviction to the mind of the ordi- 
nary reader. It was the recognition of the imperative 
need of some such work that led to the writing of this 
book. 

The author desires to acknowledge his indebted- 
ness to "The Religio-Medical Masquerade," by the 
Hon. Frederick W. Peabody, of Boston, for many 
of the facts contained in this book, especially in chap- 
ters four and five of Part II, and in chapters five and 
seven of Part III. 



PART I 

FUNDAMENTAL DOCTRINES AND TEACH- 
INGS OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 



CHAPTER I 

AN UNDERSTANDING OF THESE FUNDA- 
MENTAL DOCTRINES NECESSARY 

If Christian Science were merely a method of heal- 
ing or a system of metaphysics this book would not 
have been written. But Christian Science is not 
simply a method of healing or a system of metaphysics. 
It is also a system of religious thought and of religious 
life. It is because it is professedly religious, and is 
affecting the religious thought of people, and will 
ultimately radically affect their moral lives that it 
has been deemed worthy of notice. In fact, after 
thoroughly studying the Christian Science text-book 
and other books and pamphlets by leading Christian 
Scientists, and after years of careful observation of 
the results of Christian Science teachings on the lives 
of the people who follow them, the author is forced 
to believe that Christian Science is one of the most 
hurtful, one of the most injurious, and one of the 
most pernicious heresies that have arisen in this past 
century of heresies. He is forced to believe this, 
first, because, while claiming to be thoroughly Chris- 
tian, it is so unchristian in all its real fundamental 



12 RELIGIOUS TEACHINGS 

teachings, denying almost every fundamental tenet of 
the Christian faith ; second, because, while claiming to 
be a revival of the early Christian, apostolic healing, 
it is absolutely unchristian in its entire healing sys- 
tem; and third, because, while claiming to have such 
an uplifting Christian influence upon its people, it, 
in reality, is unchristian and harmful and will neces- 
sarily become more and more so as the years go by. 

This statement may at first sound harsh and unjust, 
because many no doubt have thought of Christian 
Science as being very beautiful and very Christian in 
its religious and in its moral and ethical teachings, 
even if in some things it is not very logical or very 
desirable. It must be remembered, however, that 
any and every system of philosophy or of religion 
must be judged, and its influence upon its followers 
and upon the world must be estimated, not by a few 
beautiful moral and ethical precepts or teachings 
tacked upon the outside, but rather by its fundamental 
philosophic and religious conceptions, by its founda- 
tion ideas and beliefs and their logical outcome in 
life. As one of the great Anglican divines has said, 
"It is easy for the organizer of a new philosophy or 
religion to plaster any amount of high morals upon 
it, which he finds ready made for him. He can endow 
his theories with all of the virtues under the sun, just 
as a writer of fiction can make the characters that 
represent his favorite school as good as he pleases. 



OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 13 

But this is all extraneous and has absolutely nothing 
to do with the root principles of the system ad- 
vocated." 

It is very true that there are many beautiful things 
about Christian Science teaching. The emphasis it 
places on love as the great thing in life, that people 
ought to love each other more and ought never to 
speak evil of anyone, is very beautiful. Its efforts 
to lead people to be cheerful and happy, to think cheer- 
ful, happy thoughts, to look on the bright side of 
things, not to talk about their ills, misfortunes, pains, 
or sorrows, but to talk about pleasant things — not 
to worry, fret, or be fearful — are all very nice and 
very commendable and have helped a great many peo- 
ple, no doubt. Its teaching that mind has influence 
over the body and that we can control the states of 
mind, and by compelling our minds to think good 
thoughts and happy thoughts and healthful thoughts, 
much of pain and suffering and sickness can be 
avoided or overcome, and thus we be happier and the 
world better off, is all true and all very beautiful. 
But these are not essential, fundamental, nor exclu- 
sive Christian Science teachings. They are not in 
any sense peculiar to Christian Science. We all — 
Methodists, Baptists, Presbyterians, Lutherans, Con- 
gregationalists, Disciples, Roman Catholics, Episco- 
palians — have believed them and taught them for 
years. In fact the Christians of the world have be- 



i 4 RELIGIOUS TEACHINGS 

lieved them for nineteen hundred years and have 
taught them in their churches everywhere. We may 
not have lived these teachings as truly as we ought, 
but not even the Christian Scientists do that. These 
are no more the real fundamental teachings of Chris- 
tian Science than the beautiful moral code of Robert 
Ingersoll was the real fundamental teachings of that 
blatant and blasphemous infidel. 

To know Christian Science as it is, to get at its 
real fundamental teachings, the student or inquirer 
after truth must strip it of these externals, these beau- 
tiful moral and ethical precepts that it has tacked upon 
the outside and that are common alike to all forms of 
the Christian religion; and then he must get down to 
the heart and core, to the foundation ideas and be- 
liefs wherein it differs from Christianity as it is or- 
dinarily understood and accepted, and wherein it 
differs from all other forms of religion. For if Chris- 
tian Science does not differ vitally and essentially in 
its fundamental conceptions and beliefs from our 
ordinary Christianity and in fact from all other forms 
of religious and philosophic belief, then on what 
ground can it claim, as it does, to be the final and ulti- 
mate world religion that is to swallow up and super- 
sede all other philosophies of life and all other reli- 
gious faiths, Christian or nonchristian, Jewish or 
pagan ? 

If Christian Science does not differ vitally and 



OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 15 

essentially in its fundamental conceptions and beliefs 
from our ordinary Christianity, then what reason can 
the Christian Scientists give for trying to proselyte 
members from all of the other Christian churches? 
If a Baptist minister or Sunday School superintendent, 
or if a Presbyterian minister or Sunday School 
superintendent should go out and attempt to proselyte 
members from the other Christian churches he would 
be looked down upon and censured by all self-respect- 
ing people everywhere. For one Christian Church to 
proselyte from another is considered not only un- 
christian but positively discourteous, unbrotherly, and 
lacking in all high sense of honor. And why is that? 
Because it is universally conceded that the various 
Christian churches are practically a unit on all the 
great fundamentals, and differ only in non-essentials 
and in matters of church polity, and that therefore 
there can be no excuse for one Christian church 
trying to draw away and proselyte the members from 
another sister church. The fact that Christian Scien- 
tists everywhere are trying to proselyte people from 
all the Christian churches, and in reality are spending 
more time in this effort to win other church people 
than in trying to reach and win the unchurched 
masses, and are also thus trying to reach people of 
all other philosophic and religious beliefs, shows con- 
clusively that they consider Christian Science vitally 
and essentially different from all other forms of the 



16 RELIGIOUS TEACHINGS 

Christian religion, and from all other forms of reli- 
gious belief everywhere. 

Every religion, every philosophy, must ultimately 
stand or fall, must be judged and estimated by its 
fundamental conceptions — by its concept of God, of 
Jesus Christ, of the Holy Spirit, of the universe, of 
man, of sin, of redemption, of the future life, of 
communion, of prayer, and by the logical and actual 
outcome of these conceptions and beliefs on the moral, 
religious, and social life of the world. If there is 
vital and essential difference between Christian Science 
and all other forms of religion, Christian and unchris- 
tian, in regard to these fundamentals, and at least 
Mrs. Eddy in her Text Book claims and teaches that 
there is, then every earnest student and inquirer after 
truth ought not to be satisfied with any beautiful 
moral or ethical precepts tacked upon the outside, 
but ought to dig down to the heart and core and get 
these fundamentals, these essential and primal things 
wherein Mrs. Eddy's doctrine and teaching and phi- 
losophy differ from those of ordinary Christianity 
and from those of all other religious beliefs and faiths. 

If people are in earnest and want to know the real 
teachings of Christian Science they may not go to an 
outsider, it is true. But neither will they go to just 
any Christian Scientist that they may happen to know 
or know about and ask him to tell them what it 
teaches ; nor will they be satisfied to read or to listen 



OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 17 

to what just any teacher or practitioner or lecturer 
may say or write concerning Christian Science, how- 
ever much confidence they may have in him ; but they 
will go first hand to the original source, to Mrs. Eddy 
herself. She was the founder, the organizer, the 
fountain head, the "inspired mouthpiece of God" for 
all Christian Science teaching and doctrine; and she 
is so recognized by every member, by every teacher, 
reader, healer, practitioner, lecturer or officer of the 
Christian Science church. Her book, "Science and 
Health with Key to the Scriptures," she claims, is 
the written statement of God's revelation to her upon 
this whole subject and its teachings, therefore, are the 
foundation of Christian Science belief and practice, 
and contain the essence and sum total of her teachings 
on all of these fundamentals. She declares, 456: 27, 
"It is the voice of truth to this age and contains the 
full statement of Christian Science, or the science of 
healing through mind." 147 : 14, "This volume con- 
tains the Complete Science of Mind-Healing." To 
enforce the importance of the whole book she says, 
547 • 3, "If on e statement of this book is true, every- 
one must be true." She made this book the text-book 
of Christian Science and it is so regarded by every 
Christian Scientist, and its teachings, therefore, are 
first and superior to all other teachings, from what- 
ever source, in Christian Science; and whenever and 
wherever there is any conflict in statement of belief 



18 RELIGIOUS TEACHINGS 

it and its teachings must be first and supreme. It is 
placed alongside the Bible and is to be read in every 
Christian Science service whenever and wherever the 
Bible is read. Hence if one wishes to get the heart 
and core, the real unadulterated teachings of Christian 
Science, he will get them in this book. And any Chris- 
tian Scientist, whether ordinary member or lecturer 
or reader or practitioner; or any pamphlet or paper 
or book on Christian Science that does not teach the 
things set forth in this book or that differs in funda- 
mental teachings from the doctrines or ideas set forth 
in this book, is not teaching Christian Science. 

To be sure and get at the real fundamental teach- 
ings of Christian Science, to be able definitely to know 
and understand first hand wherein Christian Science 
differs from our ordinary conceptions of Christianity, 
the author has gone directly to Mrs. Eddy's own book; 
and the statements made here in regard to Christian 
Science beliefs are based, every one of them, upon 
statements made in Mrs. Eddy's book, "Science and 
Health with Key to the Scriptures," copyrighted in 
1906 and published in 1907. And, that the reader may 
be absolutely sure that Mrs. Eddy has not in any in- 
stance been misquoted or misrepresented in her mean- 
ing, the author has taken the pains to give page and 
line for every quotation from her book. Of course the 
space limits of this book will not permit the giving of 
all her statements upon any one of the subjects herein 



OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 19 

discussed, but a sufficient number will be given to con- 
vince any fair-minded person that the author is not 
in any way misrepresenting her teachings, but that 
they are as here stated. Hundreds of other quota- 
tions, along the same lines, could have been given if 
space had permitted. Let it be added that the author 
has read a number of pamphlets, newspaper articles, 
and other official documents by leading Christian 
Scientists other than Mrs. Eddy, and has heard a num- 
ber of Christian Science lecturers, and in each case 
when the outside was stripped off and the real heart 
and core of their teachings was perceived, it was al- 
ways identically the same as that taught by Mrs. Eddy. 
A few quotations from some of these writers or lec- 
turers have been incorporated in this book. 



20 RELIGIOUS TEACHINGS 



CHAPTER II 

DIFFICULTY ON ACCOUNT OF UNCLEAR- 
NESS AND CONFUSION 

If the fundamental conceptions, the foundation be- 
liefs, of Christian Science were only clearly stated 
so that the ordinary reader could easily grasp and 
understand them, few people would ever be deceived 
or led astray by them. But those who have tried to 
read and understand Mrs. Eddy's book know what 
a difficult task that is. The writer prides himself that 
he can read any ordinary book and understand it. 
But never before has he undertaken to read anything 
that was so difficult to understand, so hard to get any 
intelligent meaning out of, as Mrs. Eddy's "Science 
and Health with Key to the Scriptures"; and this 
not because it was so deep and profound, but because 
it was so confused, muddled, and self-contradictory. 
The author of this book has publicly issued the chal- 
lenge defying any man or woman to find a single doc- 
trine or fundamental philosophic thought taught in 
the Christian Science text-book for which he could 
not find the opposite doctrine taught either in explicit 
statement or by direct implication. Thus far no one 



OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 21 

has accepted his challenge. It is through this mass of 
confused, muddled, unclear, contradictory statements 
and constant repetition that one has to wade in order 
to pick out the real fundamental beliefs upon which 
her whole system of healing and of religion is based. 

The reader is told that he has not the insight of the 
Christian Scientists and that is the reason it all seems 
so confused and unclear and so hard to understand. 
But that is mere child's play and an insult to the 
general intelligence of humanity. The Bible is a book 
that is so plain and simple that the "wayfaring man 
though a fool need not err therein." The child with 
its undeveloped mind can read and get sense out of 
it. Any man of ordinary intelligence can read the 
writings of Confucius or of Buddha or of Mohammed 
or of Joseph Smith, to say nothing of the writings of 
Moses or of David or of Isaiah or of Matthew or of 
Paul, and get some sense, some meaning out of them. 
It is no compliment to the intelligence of the author 
of Christian Science that she could not write her book 
and set forth her theories in such language that the 
ordinary person could easily read and understand 
them. 

Again the reader is told that he must read the book 
with a sympathetic and believing mind, else he cannot 
understand its teachings. Only those in the inner 
circle can really appreciate and understand Mrs. 
Eddy's teachings and meaning, and those who read in 



22 RELIGIOUS TEACHINGS 

this way accept her teachings and become her fol- 
lowers. Of course, that is self-evident. If one reads 
Joseph Smith's work on Mormonism with a sym- 
pathetic and believing mind he will become a Mormon. 
If he reads and studies Buddhism or Mohammedanism 
or spiritualism or witchcraft or theosophy or in fact 
any other ism with a sympathetic and believing atti- 
tude, he will in all probability become a follower of 
that ism. That goes without question. But are we 
compelled to accept a thing, to believe in it before we 
have examined it; to accept it and believe in it as a 
condition of understanding it? If we carefully and 
thoughtfully and honestly examine it, even though we 
do not believe in it; or even further, if we positively 
disbelieve in it, can we not understand its teachings 
and its meaning? Jesus said to his disbelieving 
hearers, to those who were even his enemies, "Search 
the Scriptures . . . they are they that testify of me." 
Paul commended the Bereans because they "searched 
the Scriptures daily" to see if the things that he taught 
were so, — and many of them were led to believe by 
such searchings. He told the Thessalonians to "prove 
all things." Many skeptics and disbelievers, many 
followers of Buddha or of Confucius or of Moham- 
med, have read the Bible without teacher or instruc- 
tor, and not with faith or even with an honest or 
sympathetic mind, but with the avowed purpose of 
overthrowing its teachings, and yet because of the 



OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 23 

appeal that its teachings have made to their hearts, 
to their minds, to their reason, to their common sense 
and inner consciousness, it has changed their disbe- 
lief into belief, and their unsympathetic minds into 
sympathetic minds. If one had to blindly believe in 
the Bible before he could understand it or get any 
intelligent meaning out of it, any intellectual grasp of 
even its simplest fundamental conceptions, it would 
be wholly unreasonable to ask him thus to accept it. 
It is a confession of lamentable weakness on the 
part of Christian Science that its teachings and doc- 
trines must thus blindly be accepted in order to be 
understood. Its fundamental teachings ought to be 
so plainly stated that any ordinary reader could read 
and understand them. They ought to be so self -con- 
vincing that when once stated plainly and understood, 
they would of themselves induce belief. But the fact 
is, if they were so clearly and plainly stated, very, very 
few people anywhere would ever be attracted by them 
or would ever be convinced of their truth. 



24 RELIGIOUS TEACHINGS 



CHAPTER III 

REAL FUNDAMENTAL BELIEFS ON WHICH 
THE SYSTEM IS BASED 

Christian Science as a philosophy, as a religion, as 
a system of healing, is based upon and wholly deduced 
from one simple statement of three words — "God is 
All." There is not a consistent doctrine or belief or 
teaching of the entire system that is not based upon 
or deduced from this statement and its implications. 
In a nut-shell it is this: God is all (and that is taken 
literally and metaphysically). God is Spirit, Mind, 
Soul, etc., and since God is literally all, therefore, all 
is spirit, mind, soul, and there can be no matter, no 
material body, no material universe. God is good, and 
since God is literally all, therefore, everything that is or 
has any existence is good. There is no sin, evil, or sick- 
ness in the world. God is one, and since God is Spirit, 
Mind, Soul, Life, therefore, there is only one mind, 
one spirit, one soul, one life, one person. Upon these 
and a few other like primary deductions the whole 
fabric of Christian Science teaching and doctrine is 
based, and in the following pages it will be shown in 
detail and by numerous quotations from Mrs. Eddy's 



OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 25 

book, that these are in reality her fundamental teach- 
ings. Earlier it was affirmed that Christian Science 
denies almost every fundamental tenet of the Chris- 
tian faith. By keeping this thought in mind the reader 
will see that this is true. 

First, let us get Mrs. Eddy's conception of this 
God that is all, this God that is the foundation of all 
her teaching. To the ordinary Christian, God is a 
personal, intelligent Being, and there is no question in 
his mind about it. But in Mrs. Eddy's mind and in 
her teaching there seems to be considerable of a ques- 
tion as to God's personality, as to his being a real, 
intelligent person. True she uses the words Spirit, 
Soul, Mind, Person in speaking of God. But then she 
at once begins to explain that these terms mean Princi- 
ple, Life, Truth, Love. In Mrs. Eddy's definition, 
465 : 9, she says, "God is incorporeal, divine, supreme, 
infinite Mind, Spirit, Soul, Principle, Life, Truth, 
Love," and then she says these terms are synonymous. 
So that Mind, Soul, Spirit as applied to God mean 
Principle, Truth, Love. On p. 331 : 3 she affirms "He 
(God) is divine Principle, Love, the universal cause" 
and in line 29 "Life, Truth, Love constitute the triune 
person called God, that is the truly divine Principle, 
Love." Again, she declares, 465 : 18, "Principle and 
its idea is one, and that one is God." 390 : 7, "It is 
ignorance of God, the divine Principle, which pro- 
duces apparent discord." All the way through her 



26 RELIGIOUS TEACHINGS 

book she is constantly speaking of God as divine 
Principle and in almost every place where the word 
"God" occurs it is immediately followed by the ex- 
planatory word "good" or "love" or "principle," show- 
ing that she wishes to impress upon the reader that 
God is principle and not really a person. True she 
speaks of God as mind, but when she comes to tell 
what mind is she says, 124:20, "Adhesion, cohesion, 
and attraction are properties of mind. They belong 
to divine Principle, and support the equipoise of that 
thought force which launched the earth in its orbit." 
What that means may be perfectly clear to the reader, 
but it is not to the writer of this book. That she does 
not mean the self-conscious power to think and to 
reason and to will when she says Mind, Soul, Spirit 
is evident from the fact that she grants that mortal 
man thinks and reasons and wills, and yet she denies 
that he is spirit or soul or that he has mind. When 
she speaks of God as Principle, Truth, Love she evi- 
dently does not mean that these are attributes of 
God's nature, for she flatly denies that, and censures 
those who speak of love as an attribute of God. What 
are these sentences if they are not flat denials of the 
personality of God ? 473 : 23, "A better understanding 
of God as divine Principle, Love, rather than per- 
sonality ... is required." 74th edition, Index, pp. 
°°5> 634, "God is impersonal being." "God is not 
a person." 



OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 27 

In fact Mrs. Eddy ridicules the idea of praying to 
God as a person. She says, 3 : 4, "Who would stand 
before a blackboard and pray the principle of mathe- 
matics to solve the problem ? The rule is already estab- 
lished, and it is our task to work out the solution." 
Then she says, "Shall we ask the divine Principle 
to do his own work?" Prayer to her is the under- 
standing of the Principle, God, just as the solution 
of a problem in mathematics is the understanding of 
the principle there. On p. 167: 1, she asks, "Should 
we implore a corporeal God to heal the sick out of his 
personal volition, or should we understand the infinite 
divine Principle which heals?" In her 74th edition, 
Index, p. 635, she declares that "Prayer to a personal 
God is a hindrance," "Prayer to a corporeal God is 
useless." She uses the word "corporeal" in the sense 
that we use the word "personal." 

She also ridicules the idea of faith in a person, God, 
and says that faith in Christian Science is simply the 
understanding of a principle. 23 : 16, "Faith, if it 
be mere belief, is a pendulum swinging between noth- 
ing and something, having no fixity. Faith advanced 
to spiritual understanding is the evidence gained from 
the spirit." 23 : 24, "One kind of faith trusts one's 
welfare to others (meaning God). Another kind of 
faith understands divine love, and how to work out 
one's own salvation." 488: 11, "The Scriptures often 
appear in their common version to approve and en- 



28 RELIGIOUS TEACHINGS 

dorse belief, when they mean to enforce the necessity 
of understanding." 15:28, "Understanding, not be- 
lief, gains the ear and right hand of omnipotence." 

Thus all the way through her book, while she says 
God is personal and calls him Spirit, Soul, Mind, she 
in reality denies the essential personality of God and 
makes him simply a divine principle to be under- 
stood. 

Christian Science also denies the personality of 
Jesus Christ, and of the Holy Spirit. Since it makes 
God the only Spirit, the only Mind, the only Life, 
the only Person, and then makes that person only a 
principle to be understood, it could not very consis- 
tently admit the personality of Jesus Christ or of the 
Holy Spirit. In fact, Mrs. Eddy clearly denies this. 
She says, 256 : 9, "The theory of three persons in one 
God, (that is personal Trinity or Triunity) suggests 
polytheism." 517: 15, "There is but one person, be- 
cause there is but one God." Miscellaneous Writings, 
p. 180, "Christ is the impersonal Saviour." She even 
makes the Master deny the reality of his own mind. 
314:9, "Our master gained the solution of being, 
demonstrating the existence of but one Mind, without 
a second or equal." She also says, 469 : 28, "This 
belief that there is more than one mind is as pernicious 
to divine theology as are ancient mythology or pagan 
idolatry." 466: 19, "The term souls or spirits is as 
improper as the term gods. Soul or Spirit mean 



OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 29 

only one mind, and cannot be rendered in the plural." 
347 : 6, "God is the only Life." 

Thus it is seen that Christian Science plainly denies 
the personality of both Jesus Christ and the Holy 
Spirit. What does it make Jesus Christ to be? It 
divides him into two. It makes Christ to be simply 
an idea, a reflection of God, divine Principle. It 
makes Jesus to be the human manifestation of that 
idea or reflection. Mrs. Eddy says, 313 : 16, "Christ 
is the Son of God, the royal reflection of the infinite." 
333 : 3°> "Christ is the spiritual idea — the reflection of 
God." 332 : 19, "Christ is the divine idea of God." 
473:10, "Christ is the ideal truth." 334:1, "The 
human Jesus was not eternal, but the divine idea or 
Christ was so; the corporeal Jesus was not one with 
the Father, but the spiritual idea, Christ, dwelt for- 
ever in the bosom of the Father." 589 : 16, "Jesus — 
The highest human corporeal concept of the divine 
idea." 29: 17, "The Virgin-mother conceived this 
idea of God, and gave to her ideal the name of Jesus." 
29 : 32, "Jesus was the offspring of Mary's self-con- 
scious communion with God." Thus Mary gave birth, 
not to a person, but to an idea, and named that idea 
Jesus. Mrs. Eddy denies that this human manifesta- 
tion, or Jesus, ever died at all, but simply hid himself 
in the tomb to escape his enemies. 44 : 28, "His disci- 
ples believed Jesus to be dead while he was hidden in 
the sepulchre, whereas he was alive." 44:5, "The 



30 RELIGIOUS TEACHINGS 

lonely precincts of the tomb gave Jesus a refuge from 
his foes, a place to solve the great problem of being. 
His three days' work in the sepulchre set the seal of 
eternity on time/' 

This conception destroys absolutely any thought of 
Jesus Christ as a living, personal Saviour, Redeemer, 
Life-Giver. There was no sacrifice of his life; no 
death upon the cross for our redemption ; no real per- 
son who suffered and was tempted and who therefore 
knows how to succor those who suffer and are 
tempted. Only an idea, a reflection of a principle, 
that is all we have. Prayer to this principle, or rather 
to this reflection of a principle, would be the sheerest 
mockery. This conception denies all personal com- 
munion, all sympathy, all personal help from Jesus 
Christ. All that is left us of our blessed Master is 
a royal reflection of the infinite principle, and a non- 
existing, mythical human manifestation of that reflec- 
tion. More will be said concerning the Christian 
Science conception of Jesus Christ and concerning the 
Christian Science conception of the Holy Spirit later 
when the blasphemies of this system are considered. 

In the third place, Christian Science denies all per- 
sonality and all mentality to man. It teaches that there 
are two very different kinds of man. One is what 
Mrs. Eddy calls the real man, the other what she 
calls the mortal man. The first, the real man, is the 
only man that has any existence, any reality what- 



OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 31 

ever. The second, the mortal man, has no existence, 
no reality, and is only an illusion, a myth. 

The real man, Mrs. Eddy says, is, like Christ, the 
reflection of divine Principle, God, — a lower form of 
reflection than Christ. 471 : 12, "Man is, and ever has 
been, God's reflection." 120 : 5, "Man co-exists with 
and reflects Soul, God." 126 : 5, "Mortality will cease 
when man beholds himself God's reflection, even as 
a man sees his reflection in the glass." 303 : 25, "God, 
without the image and likeness of himself, would be 
a non-entity." In her definition, 115:15, she says, 
"Man — God's spiritual idea. Idea — an image in the 
mind." Now if Mrs. Eddy meant by man's being the 
"reflection" or "image" or "idea" of God, that he like 
God was a spirit, a soul, and that like him he had a 
mind and was free to think and to will, it would be 
easy to agree with her. But she positively denies this. 
She declares, 347 : 6, "Nothing really has life but 
God." 472 : 1, "God is the only life." 175 : 16, "Man 
has no separate mind from God." 204 : 27, "In Science 
it can never be said that man has a mind of his own, 
distinct from God." 469 : 14, "God, good, is the only 
mind. There can be but one mind." 466 : 10, "The 
term 'souls' or 'spirits' is as improper as the term 
'gods.' There is no finite soul or spirit." 216 : 12, 
"There is but one mind or intelligence." 249 : 32, 
"There is but one ego. We run into error when we 
divide soul into souls, multiply mind into minds." 



32 RELIGIOUS TEACHINGS 

What could be stronger than this assertion of Mrs. 
Eddy, 330: 11, "God is infinite, the only life, sub- 
stance, spirit, or soul, the only intelligence of the 
universe, including man"? On p. 517: 15, by specific 
statement she denies man's personality. She says, 
"The world believes in many persons, but if God is 
personal, there is but one person, because there is but 
one God." Thus Christian Science denies all life, all 
mentality, all intelligence, all personality, all life to 
this the only man that has any existence in the uni- 
verse. 

Christian Science teaches that this real man never 
was born and never will die. 244 : 23, "Man in Science 
is neither young nor old. He has neither birth nor 
death." 557 : 18, "Divine Science rolls back the clouds 
of error with the light of truth and lifts the curtain 
on man as never born and as never dying, but as co- 
existent with his Creator." Mrs. Eddy teaches that 
this man is and always has been co-eternal with God. 
471 : 17, "Man is, and forever has been, God's reflec- 
tion." 120: 5, "Man co-exists with and reflects Soul, 
God." 

Christian Science teaches that this real man was, 
is, and always will be absolutely perfect. 200: 16, 
"The great truth in Science of being that the real man 
was, is, and ever shall be perfect, is incontrovertible." 
266:29, "He (man) is above sin or frailty." 302: 19, 
"The Science of being reveals man as perfect, even as 



OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 33 

the Father in heaven is perfect." 428 : 22 y "The great 
spiritual fact must be brought out that man is, not 
shall be, perfect and immortal." Dr. F. J. Fluno, an 
official Christian Science lecturer, said in an address 
delivered in Freeport, Illinois, January, 1908, "Man in 
Christian Science is a perfect expression of his pure 
and perfect Principle, God, and is as perfect now 
as he ever was or ever will be; and is as perfect as 
God his maker, which is perfection itself." 

Mrs. Eddy goes even farther and declares that it is 
absolutely impossible for this real man to sin. 258 : 27, 
"Never born and never dying it were impossible for 
man under the government of God in eternal Science 
to fall from his high estate." 476 : 28, "Man is in- 
capable of sin, sickness, and death. The real man 
cannot depart from holiness, nor can God, by whom 
man is evolved, engender the capacity or freedom 
to sin." 480: 19, "Again God, good, never made man 
capable of sin." We begin to ask ourselves who this 
man is, the real man, the only man in Christian Science 
that has any being or reality whatever, and then Mrs. 
Eddy tells us just what every one must conjecture, 
258:16, "We know no more of man as the true divine 
image and likeness, than we know of God." 555 : 16, 
"Searching for the origin of man ... is like in- 
quiring into the origin of God, the self-existent and 
eternal." He is a far off, distant, shadowy reflection 
of a principle, without mind or thought or feeling. 



34 RELIGIOUS TEACHINGS 

Let us look now at the other man that Christian 
Science talks about. He is called the "mortal man," 
the "mortal mind/' "mortals," "material sense," etc. 
He is the man that we see every day, that we talk 
with; in fact, he is what we in our inner conscious- 
ness realize ourselves to be. He eats and drinks, sees 
and hears, goes and comes, thinks and feels, and wills, 
loves and hates, is sick and well, sins, commits crime, 
and so on. 

This mortal man or mortal mind is a most impor- 
tant element in Christian Science philosophy and reli- 
gion. First of all, it constructs the human body. 108 : 
30, "My discovery that erring, mortal, misnamed mind 
produces all organisms and action of the mortal body." 
402: 14, "Mortal mind constructs the mortal body with 
this mind's own mortal materials." 220 : 30, "Mortal 
mind forms all conditions of the mortal body." 399: 
16, "Mortal mind perpetuates its own thought. It 
constructs a machine, manages it, and then calls it 
material." 222 : 8, "Mortal mind makes a mortal 
body." 

Second, it absolutely controls this mortal body. 
Mrs. Eddy asks, 399 : 32, "How can I heal the body 
without beginning with the so-called mortal mind 
which directly controls the body?" 162:12, "Ex- 
periments have favored the fact that mind governs the 
body, not in one instance, but in every instance." 
220:30, "Mortal mind . . . controls the stomach, 






OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 35 

bones, lungs, heart, blood, etc., as directly as the voli- 
tion or will moves the hand." 187: 13, "The valves 
of the heart, opening and closing for the passage of 
blood, obey the mandate of mortal mind as directly 
as does the hand, admittedly moved by the will." In 
fact, Mrs. Eddy goes so far as to say that it is possible 
for a man who has a leg cut off and destroyed to think 
a new real leg back in its place, or to burn himself 
up by spontaneous combustion simply by thinking it. 
489 : 3, "If the science of life, were understood . . . 
then the human limb would be replaced as readily as 
the lobster's claw, — not with an artificial limb but with 
a genuine one." 161 : 3, "You say 'I have burned my 
finger/ This is an exact statement, more exact than 
you suppose; for mortal mind and not matter burns 
it. Holy inspiration has created states of mind which 
have been able to nullify the action of flames . . . 
while an opposite mental state might produce spon- 
taneous combustion." 

Third, it produces, in fact, the whole physical uni- 
verse — matter, earth, stars, material laws, forces, and 
everything. 114:30, "Science shows that what is 
termed matter is but the subjective state of what is 
termed mortal mind." 125:31, "This matter will 
finally be proved nothing but mortal belief." 512:25, 
"Mortal mind inverts the true likeness, and confers 
animal names and natures upon its misconceptions." 
484: 11, "What is termed natural science and material 



36 RELIGIOUS TEACHINGS 

laws are the objective state of mortal mind." 484: 3, 
"The physical universe expresses the conscious and 
unconscious thoughts of mortals. Physical force and 
mortal mind are one." 374 : 26, "Heat and cold are 
products of mortal mind." Thus this mortal mind 
is made to construct not only our bodies, but absolutely 
the whole physical universe, everything that seems to 
us material — all trees, plants, flowers, animals, rocks, 
oceans, stars, everything. 

In the fourth place, this mortal mind produces or 
creates or imagines all diseases and all sin. Mrs. 
Eddy declares, 159:30, "Man's belief produces dis- 
eases." 153: 17, "A boil simply manifests a belief in 
pain, and this belief is called a boil." Speaking of a 
burned finger she says, 161 : 5, "Mortal mind and not 
matter burns it." And again, 379 : 25, "Fevers are 
errors of various types. The quickened pulse, coated 
tongue, febrile heat, dry skin, pain in the head and 
limbs, are pictures drawn on the body by a mortal 
mind." And so it produces all there is of sin. 71 : 2, 
"Evil has no reality ... is simply a belief, an illu- 
sion of material sense." 393 : 30, "A false belief is 
both the tempter and the tempted, the sin and the 
sinner." 89 : 24, "The corporeal senses are the only 
source of evil or error." 

The strange and incongruous thing, however, is that 
this mortal mind which does all of these things — pro- 
duces and controls the human body, creates matter 



OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 37 

and the whole physical universe with all of its 
forces and laws, produces all disease, and commits 
all sins and crimes — this mortal mind has absolutely 
no existence whatever, is merely a non-existing myth. 
Mrs. Eddy affirms, 103 : 29, "In reality there is no 
mortal mind." 114: 14, "The phrase mortal mind im- 
plies something untrue and therefore unreal; and as 
the phrase is used in teaching Christian Science, it is 
meant to designate something which has no real exist- 
ence." 399 : 23, "Scientifically speaking, there is no 
mortal mind out of which to make material beliefs, 
springing from illusion. This misnamed mind is not 
an entity." 490:29 "Sleep shows material sense as 
either oblivion, nothingness, or an illusion or dream." 
150:31, "The host of ^Esculapius are flooding the 
world with diseases because they are ignorant that 
the human mind and body are myths." 151 : 31, "That 
the mortal mind claims to govern every organ of the 
human body, we have overwhelming proof. But this 
so-called mind is a myth." Dr. Fluno, to whom refer- 
ence was made earlier, said in his address, "The so- 
called man and material universe, far from being 
spiritual, was never made by spirit, God, and is only 
of mortal mind creation, which mortal mind itself is 
false, and is the mere negative of being." 

If mortal mind which produces matter and the 
material universe and the material body has no exist- 
ence and is merely a myth, it goes without saying that 



38 RELIGIOUS TEACHINGS 

matter and the whole physical universe and our bodies 
too, can have no existence whatever, no reality, and 
are only myths and dreams of a non-existing mythical 
mind. And such indeed is what Christian Science 
teaches them to be. Mrs. Eddy says, 109: 2, "Matter 
is naught." 113:18, "Nothing is matter." 123:12, 
"Matter seems to be but is not." 127: 19, "Matter is 
the falsity, not the fact of existence." 223:8, "If 
spirit is all and everywhere, what and where is mat- 
ter?" 150:31, "The human mind and body are 
myths." Christian Science thus destroys all reality 
to human learning and human knowledge. Geography 
and botany and zoology and biology and astronomy, 
and in fact almost the whole of science and philoso- 
phy have no foundation whatever. Mrs. Eddy admits, 
127:23, "There is no physical science." She says, 
209 : 25, "Material substances or mundane forma- 
tions, astronomical calculations, and all of the para- 
phernalia of speculative theories, based upon the 
hypothesis of material law . . . will ultimately van- 
ish." Dr. Fluno, in this connection, said, "Christian 
Science reveals the fact that this physical universe, 
so called, this world of finite sense, is already at an 
end, because unreal. And is it not fair to suppose 
that we are in gross and blinded ignorance who still 
support the sense testimony of a material earth and 
stellar universe and a physical creation?" 

Thus Christian Science makes everything about us 



OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 39 

that seems to be real, our own selves, our bodies, our 
minds, the earth on which we live, the trees and grass 
and flowers, the sky, the sun, the stars, everything to 
have no existence, no reality whatever, to be but the 
mythical imaginings of our own minds, and then even 
denies any existence, any reality to these minds. 

Of course, if matter has no existence and there is 
not any physical body there cannot be any disease or 
sickness. If matter — that is, the body — is only a myth, 
and the mortal mind that thinks disease in connection 
with the body is also a non-existing myth, then surely 
the disease or sickness that is produced on this 
mythical body by this mythical mind would be the 
most mythical myth that could be produced upon this 
mythical earth. Christian Science says there is no 
such thing as matter, it has no reality whatever, is the 
same as absolute nothingness, so of course drugs which 
are material have no reality, no properties that could 
affect disease which is, if possible, even more non- 
existent and mythical than they are. This is perfectly 
plain and almost self-evident. 

The nonexistent, mythical nature of the mortal 
mind, which alone, in the teachings of Christian 
Science, can possibly sin, necessarily makes sin non- 
existent and unreal. Mrs. Eddy substantiates this 
conclusion by statement after statement all through 
her book. 71 : 2, "Evil has no reality, is simply a 
belief, an illusion of mortal sense." 276: 17, "If God 



40 RELIGIOUS TEACHINGS 

is admitted to be the only Mind and Life, there ceases 
to be any opportunity for sin and death." 480 : 23, 
"Evil is but an illusion, and has no real basis." 207 : 9, 
"Evil is the awful deception and unreality of exist- 
ence." Mrs. Eddy even goes so far as to say that 
there is nothing that can sin or be punished for sin. 
It has previously been shown where Mrs. Eddy claimed 
that the real man, the only existing man, not only 
could not possibly sin, but God could not even give 
him the power or capacity to sin. 1 Again she says, 
340 : 23, "One infinite God, good, . . . annuls the 
curse on man and leaves nothing that can sin, suffer, 
be punished, or destroyed." 105:13, 'The mortal 
mind ... is the criminal in every case." Mortal 
mind, myth, is the only sinner, and mortal mind has 
no existence. 

Of the one who believes there is such a thing as sin 
in the world Christian Science asks, How did it get 
here? Did not God create all things? The Bible 
teaches that he made everything that was made. If 
he did, did he create sin and evil ? Mrs. Eddy claims, 
583 : 24, that "God made all that was made, and could 
not create an atom or an element the opposite of 
himself." If God is wholly good, how or why should 
he create evil ? Why create evil and then punish the 
evil ? These are subtle questions, and, no doubt, have 
confused a great many people. They arise from two 



OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 41 

things: first, a misstatement of facts; and second, 
unclear thinking. We say God created all things, 
that he made everything that was made. And in a 
general sense that is true. He is the one supreme 
Creator and has no equal or rival. But in literal detail 
it is not wholly true. God created the physical uni- 
verse. He created all intelligent beings and gave them 
what power they have. When God created us, in 
making us intelligent personal beings, he gave to us 
power and freedom to do and make some things our 
selves. A woman makes her bread. She may not 
make the materials, but she puts them together, forms 
the loaf, and then bakes it. A jeweler makes his 
watch, a carpenter builds his house, a painter paints 
his picture. God does not do any of these things. 
If we waited until God took a hammer and nails and 
built us a house we would wait a long time. We can 
walk and talk and eat. God does not do these things 
for us. We think and reason and will. Our thoughts 
are our own creation as truly as God's thoughts are 
his. We love and hate, we give a poor man something 
to eat, or we steal money from the home of the rich. 
These and a thousand other things we do and we know 
it. It is not a fact that God literally makes or does 
everything, and neither the Bible nor philosophy nor 
common sense teaches that he does. 

In the second place, sin is not a thing. It has no 
existence as a book or a chair or a human being. Sin 



42 RELIGIOUS TEACHINGS 

is the conscious wrong choice or act of a morally 
responsible, free, intelligent person. It is not a sepa- 
rate, distinct thing, and cannot be separated from that 
personal choice or act. God did not create sin or evil, 
neither did he create good or righteousness. God 
created man, created him in his image, that is, created 
him as an intelligent person, with moral insight to 
distinguish between right and wrong and with moral 
freedom and power of choice. In making man a 
morally responsible being he had to give him that 
knowledge, that freedom, and that power. Without 
it man would have been no more a morally responsible 
being than is a stick or a stone or a tree. Man, thus 
knowing right and wrong and being absolutely free to 
choose his course of action, does sometimes choose 
to do wrong just as at other times he chooses to do 
right. Sin is this conscious, free choice of wrong. 
It is not a thing that God created, but a conscious 
choice or purpose of an intelligent and free person. 
And every man knows in his own inner consciousness 
that he can and oftentimes does make choices that 
are wrong, just as at other times he can and does make 
choices that are right and good. A child at one time 
chooses to disobey his parents, and is perfectly con- 
scious when he does it that he is doing wrong. At 
another time he chooses to obey and is conscious that 
he is doing the right. That wrong act of the child 
is just as much a reality as is the good act. So our 



OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 43 

sins are just as much realities, just as much facts of 
life, as are our right acts. God does not any more 
create our good or right acts or choices than he does 
our wrong or sinful acts. He does not create either 
one of them. He created us morally free and responsi- 
ble, and we voluntarily choose and do either good or 
evil. Theorize as much as we will, our inner con- 
sciousness and our good common sense tell us that this 
is true. And this is in perfect harmony with Bible 
teaching as well as with the facts of life. 



44 RELIGIOUS TEACHINGS 



CHAPTER IV 

CHRISTIAN SCIENCE DOCTRINE OF SALVA- 
TION 

Christian Science, in denying the reality of sin, mak- 
ing it only a fiction of the imagination of the mortal 
mind, denies all need of salvation or of a Saviour or 
Redeemer. In fact, it denies the whole Christian 
conception of salvation. This will be taken up in 
detail, for it is important to know just what Chris- 
tian Science teaches upon this subject. 

Earlier in this book it was shown how Christian 
Science teaches that sin has no reality, that it is not a 
tragic fact of life but a mere fiction of the mortal 
mind. 1 If this be true, then, there is nothing to be 
forgiven, nothing to be saved from. It teaches that 
there is no person, no soul, that sins. The real man, 
the only man that has any existence whatever, never 
did sin, does not now sin, cannot sin, and not even 
God can give him the power or capacity to sin. 2 The 
mortal man is the only sinner, and he has no existence, 
no reality, is only a myth. 3 If this be true then there 
is no sinner to be saved. It teaches that there is no 
final judgment. Mrs. Eddy says, 291 : 28, "No final 

' Pp. 36, 39. 40. * Pp. 32, 33. « P. 37. 



OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 45 

judgment awaits mortals," and again, 105 : 13, "there 
is nothing that can sin, suffer, be punished, or de- 
stroyed." There is no such thing as a lost soul. 481 : 
29, "In Science we learn that it is material sense, 
not a soul which sins, and it will be found that it is 
the sense of sin which is lost, and not a sinful soul." 
Hence, if there be no lost souls, no sinful souls, and 
there be no penalty or suffering or final judgment, it 
is pretty hard to see where salvation in any real sense 
of that word is coming in. Sin has no reality. The 
mortal man is the only sinner and he has no existence. 
The mortal man is not the real man and cannot be- 
come the real man, but will ultimately simply disap- 
pear into nothingness. He is not a child of God, and 
hence he cannot be redeemed or brought back to his 
original sinless state. 476: 13, "Mortals are not fallen 
children of God. They never had a perfect state of 
being which may subsequently be regained. Mortals 
will disappear." 

Hence Christ's mission, in so far as he had a mis- 
sion, was not to save people from sin and its awful 
consequences, as we have believed and as the New 
Testament teaches, but was simply to destroy belief 
in sin, to show that God is all and that God is good and 
that therefore, there can be no evil, no sin. Mrs. 
Eddy says, 26:16, "His mission was to reveal the 
science of celestial being, to prove what God is, and 
what he does for man." 473 : 6, "Christ came to de- 



46 RELIGIOUS TEACHINGS 

stroy the belief of sin." Miscellaneous Writings, 
p. 63, "If there is no sin, why did Jesus come to save 
sinners? Jesus came to seek and to save such as be- 
lieve in the reality of the unreal, to save them from 
this false belief." There is no forgiveness, no remis- 
sion of sins, in the New Testament sense of the word, 
in Christian Science doctrine. 497 : 9, "We acknowl- 
edge the forgiveness of sin in the destruction of sin 
and the spiritual understanding that casts out evil as 
unreal." 339 : 2, "Truth destroys error, and love 
destroys hate. Being destroyed, sin needs no other 
forgiveness." Although Mrs. Eddy says over and 
over again that there is no suffering for sin, yet she 
claims that forgiveness will not change the result of 
one's action, that he must suffer the full consequences. 
5: 9, "There is no discount in the law of justice and 
we must pay the utmost farthing." 6:1, "We cannot 
escape the penalty due to sin." 

In Christian Science there is no redemption through 
the sacrifice of Jesus Christ, no atonement for sin. 
Mrs. Eddy says that the death of Christ meant no more 
than his life. She says, 23:3, "One sacrifice, how- 
ever great, is insufficient to pay the debt of sin. The 
atonement requires constant self-immolation." So 
that the sacrifice of Jesus Christ upon the cross had 
no special efficacy for us. In fact, she even denies the 
death of Jesus altogether. She says, 44 : 28, 5, "His 
disciples believed Jesus to be dead while he was hidden 



OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 47 

in the sepulchre, whereas he was alive." "The lonely 
precincts of the tomb gave Jesus a refuge from his 
foes, a place to solve the great problem of being." 
So that what he claimed to be his death was only 
a ruse to fool and escape his enemies. Christian 
Science nowhere places any value upon or ascribes any 
redeeming efficacy to the death of Jesus Christ. There 
is no Communion or Lord's Supper observed in any 
Christian Science church anywhere, no taking of the 
bread and wine in memory of the broken body and 
shed blood, the sacrifice of Jesus upon the cross for 
our redemption. There is no new birth, no regenera- 
tion, no conversion in any such sense as that in which 
the term is ordinarily understood, in Christian Science 
teaching or doctrine. There is no new divine life that 
comes into the soul of the redeemed sinner to enable 
him to overcome; no abiding in Jesus Christ and re- 
ceiving divine life from him as the branch abides in 
the vine and receives its life and strength from the 
vine; no salvation by repentance and forgiveness; no 
justification by faith in Jesus Christ as a personal 
Saviour. In fact, Mrs. Eddy openly says, that Christ 
is not a personal Saviour: Miscellaneous Writings, 
p. 180, "Christ is the impersonal Saviour." Edward 
A. Kimball, C.S.D., in his booklet, "Christian Science ; 
its Advantages to Mankind," p. 46, says, "What shall 
I do to be saved ? An answer that is veiled in mystery 
or mysticism — one that taxes the credulity of man to 



48 RELIGIOUS TEACHINGS 

the utmost limit by asking him to have faith in that 
which he cannot understand ... is not practical." 

What then does Christian Science teach in regard 
to sin and salvation? For, in spite of its denials of 
sin, it is nevertheless trying to get rid of it, just 
as it denies all reality to sickness, and yet spends most 
of its time in trying to cure and get rid of disease. 
Hermann S. Herring, P.B., in his booklet called 
"Science of Salvation," p. 13, says: "Salvation, or 
deliverance from evil, is a mental process . . . 
through education and experience." And indeed that 
is just what Mrs. Eddy makes it to be. It is salvation 
by personal reformation, and that through one's own 
personal understanding of a principle and not by any 
divine power or aid given from above. It is always 
an intellectual process, a process of understanding. 
In her definition, 593:20, she says, "Salvation — Life, 
Truth, and Love understood and demonstrated as 
supreme over all." On p. 384 : 30, she says, "sickness, 
sin, and death must at length quail before the divine 
rights of intelligence." As was said before, there is 
no forgiveness of sins, no redemption through the 
sacrifice of Jesus Christ, but rather simply an under- 
standing of the principle that God is all, God is good 
and therefore all is good, and sin and evil have no 
reality. 

There is no suffering or penalty, no judgment here- 
after. Understanding this, the thing to do is just to 



OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 49 

go ahead and forget all about it. It is reformation 
always through this understanding, and never salva- 
tion by faith in Jesus Christ as a personal Saviour. 
This will be seen all through the following passages, 
and it is in hundreds of others, were there the space 
to give them. Preface, 11: 11, "By operation of 
divine Principle before which sin and disease lose their 
reality." 480 : 29, "If sin, sickness, and death were 
understood as nothingness, they would disappear." 
15:16, "In the quiet sanctuary of earnest longing 
we must deny sin and plead God's allness." 339 : 28, 
"To get rid of sin through Science is to divest sin of 
any supposed mind or reality . . . you conquer error 
by denying its verity." 447 : 24, "To put down the 
claim of sin, you must detect it, remove the mask, point 
out the illusion, and thus get the victory over sin and 
so prove its unreality." Then she says, 404 : 26, "Heal- 
ing the sick and reforming the sinner are one and the 
same thing in Christian Science. Both cures require 
the same method and are inseparable in Truth." 
395 • 10, "The same principle cures both sin and sick- 
ness." 406 : 3, "Sin and sickness are both healed by 
the same principle." Now notice in connection with 
the above the following passages describing the method 
of physical healing. Preface, 11: 11, "The physical 
healing of Christian Science results now, as in Jesus' 
time, from the operation of divine principle, before 
which sin and disease lose their reality in human con- 



5 o RELIGIOUS TEACHINGS 

sciousness." 376: 21, "Therefore the efficient remedy 
is to destroy the patient's false belief." 447 : 27, "The 
sick are not healed merely by declaring that there is 
no sickness, but by knowing that there is none." 165 : 
19, "Your remedy lies in forgetting the whole thing." 

Not one word is said in all of these passages con- 
cerning forgiveness, redemption, justification by faith, 
regeneration, or in fact, concerning any work wrought 
in the heart or life by God or by Jesus Christ or by 
the Holy Spirit ; nothing is said about any divine help 
given or offered to the sinner to enable him to over- 
come or to escape from his sins. It is all reforma- 
tion, getting rid of sin by the understanding of a 
principle, realizing its nothingness and then forget- 
ting about it — no adoption, no sonship, no companion- 
ship with Jesus or the Father, no offered hope of a 
glorious hereafter with Jesus and the redeemed. And 
although the author has read Mrs. Eddy's book 
through carefully several times, he has never found 
these things taught anywhere in the book. Surely 
this is not Christianity, else Christ and his disciples 
did not know Christianity. 



OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 51 

CHAPTER V 

CHRISTIAN SCIENCE PHILOSOPHY 

The question is often asked, Is the Christian Science 
doctrine of God and the universe pantheistic? Chris- 
tian Scientists say, "No." They deny it very em- 
phatically. And in a sense they are right. Pantheism 
is "the doctrine that the universe, taken or conceived 
of as a whole, is God; the doctrine that there is no 
God but the combined forces and laws which are mani- 
fested in the existing universe." In other words, 
pantheism says that everything is God. Christian 
Science says that God is all, God is everything. Now 
that sounds as though they were very much alike. 
But when one comes to examine and analyze the two 
he will see that they are not at all alike. For pan- 
theism accepts the physical universe as it is, or as it 
seems to be, with all of its matter, its forces and laws 
and life and intelligence, and says that all of these 
combined make or constitute God. Christian Science, 
on the other hand, says that all of this physical uni- 
verse, with its apparent matter, forces, laws, life, in- 
telligence, is not an actuality, has no reality whatever, 
is only the dream of a mythical, mortal mind. It 



52 RELIGIOUS TEACHINGS 

says God is all, but these things are not a part of that 
all, for they do not exist, they have no reality. God 
is Soul, Mind, Spirit, and since God is all, therefore, 
all must be soul, mind, spirit, and there can be no 
physical universe. Pantheism begins with the uni- 
verse of apparent reality and says that it is all there 
is, that there can be nothing outside of it, and hence, 
denies any other God. Christian Science begins with 
God, says that he is all, that there can be nothing 
outside of him, and hence, denies all existence, all 
reality to the apparent universe. 

Christian Science philosophy is one of deduction. 
Mrs. Eddy starts with the proposition that God is 
all. She takes this in a metaphysical and literal sense. 
Hence she is forced to absolutely deny any existence 
whatever to anything that is not God. If she admits 
that a thing that is not God has any existence, any 
reality whatever, however shadowy, then she must 
admit that God is not absolutely and entirely all, and 
her philosophy of deduction fails. If she admits 
that matter or the phyiscal body or the physical uni- 
verse or even the mind of man, or anything whatever, 
that is not God has any existence at all of any kind, 
any shadow of an existence, even for the shortest 
instant of time, then for that instant God is not abso- 
lutely and literally all. And if there is an instant, 
however short, in which God is not absolutely all, 
then she might as well admit there are a thousand in- 



OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 53 

stants or that there is even an eternity in which he 
is not all. So her philosophy, if she would be at all 
consistent, forces her to absolutely deny any existence 
whatever to matter, to the physical universe, to man, 
to Jesus Christ, to the Holy Spirit, in fact, to every- 
thing that seems to us to have existence; or else, on 
the other hand, if she admits any existence, any reality 
whatever, even temporary reality, to any of these 
things she must admit that they are God; but that 
would be the baldest pantheism. Has God ever 
created anything at all? If he has, is that creation 
God? Did God create himself? If this creation is 
not himself, then it is not God, and her proposition 
that God is all fails. Does God think? If he does, 
are his thoughts God? If they are not, then God is 
not all. To avoid this dilemma she says that all is 
God and God's reflection. But what does she mean 
by God's reflection? Does she mean something that 
is not God but which is in the likeness or image of 
God? If she does then God is not literally all. Is a 
man's reflection in a glass himself? No one who 
thinks at all clearly would say that it is. If she means 
that this reflection is a part of God then she becomes 
necessarily pantheistic. Thus when one tries to follow 
out the fundamentals of her philosophy to their logical 
conclusion he soon becomes lost in a maze of self- 
contradiction or else of bewildering unclearness. 
The claim is made that Mrs. Eddy's philosophy in 



54 RELIGIOUS TEACHINGS 

its denial of objective reality to matter, to material 
drugs, to the human body, and to the physical universe, 
and in its conception that they are only the creation 
or product of human thought, is a revolt against the 
gross materialistic conceptions of the past century, 
is more idealistic, and as such is nearer to the advanced 
philosophic thinking of recent years than is most of 
our religious philosophy. And this claim has had con- 
siderable weight with some, even thinking people, who 
have not taken the pains to go to the bottom of it. 

It is true that the idealist, in order to avoid an 
impossible dualism in the world, denies that matter and 
the physical universe are wholly different from mind 
and thought. And in that the best philosophy of to- 
day shows that he is right. If matter and the physical 
universe were wholly and absolutely different from 
mind and thought, then it would be hard to see how 
there could be any communion or interchange between 
them ; how, for instance, mind could grasp or know 
or understand that which was or is wholly and abso- 
lutely different, and entirely out of the realm of mind 
and thought. In fact, it would be an impossibility. 
Hence, the idealist concludes that matter and the 
physical universe, because they and the forces and 
laws governing them can be known and understood by 
the mind and thought of man, must therefore be the 
product of mind and must be of the nature of thought. 
And in that the best philosophy upholds him. But 



OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 55 

the pure idealist goes too far and makes a mistake 
when he claims that matter and the physical universe 
are not only the product of mind and of the nature of 
thought, but are the product of the individual man's 
mind, that is, that his mind makes or thinks its own 
physical world, and that all the reality there is to any 
physical object, such as his own body, a tree, a house, 
a mountain, or a star, is the reality that his own mind 
gives to it, and that these things have no objective 
reality whatever independent of his mind, that in 
reality there is nothing there except as he thinks it 
there. 

Undoubtedly this is Mrs. Eddy's conception and 
the conception of Christian Science. It is all through 
her book everywhere. It is true that Mrs. Eddy is 
not always consistent in the statement of any of her 
theories, but in so far as she is consistent in anything, 
she is consistent in this conception, only that she 
carries it much farther than even the wildest idealist 
ever dreamed of carrying it. She not only denies 
any objective reality to matter and the physical uni- 
verse and makes them wholly the product of the 
human mind and thought, but she even goes so far 
as to say that this human mind that thinks matter and 
the human body and the physical universe itself has 
no reality whatever, no real existence and is only a 
myth, a delusion. The pure idealistic theory has long 
ago been exploded. It has been shown to be an abso- 



56 RELIGIOUS TEACHINGS 

lutely impossible theory. We all realize that our 
bodies, the trees, the houses, the mountains, and the 
stars are here about us just as truly and as actually 
whether we think them here or not. This physical 
world, whatever its objective nature may be, is not 
the product of my thought, nor of your thought, nor 
of all our thoughts combined. It would exist just as 
truly whether I thought about it or not, or whether 
you thought about it or not, or whether any human 
being at all thought about it. I cannot change it by 
thinking it something else. I cannot change its nature, 
nor can I change the forces or laws that govern it, by 
my thinking. Neither can you. Neither could all of 
humanity combined. We all realize that there is an 
objective reality to this physical universe, which objec- 
tive reality is absolutely independent of our thought 
about it. If by some catastrophe, some deadly plague, 
the whole human race should suddenly be wiped out 
of existence, this earth would be here just the same 
with its mountains and rivers and oceans, with its 
various forces and laws acting just the same as now. 
So whatever the nature of this objective reality, of 
one thing we are absolutely sure, that matter and the 
physical universe have some kind of objective reality, 
there is something there wholly independent of our 
human thinking. So that if Mrs. Eddy went no 
farther in her philosophy than the pure idealist, her 
philosophy would be wholly untenable. But when 



OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 57 

she goes so far as to say that matter and the physical 
universe have no objective reality whatever, but are 
wholly the creations or imaginings of the human mind, 
and then denies to that mind any existence whatever, 
and makes it only a nonexisting myth, she places her 
philosophy outside the pale of all intelligent thinking. 
If Mrs. Eddy and Christian Science claimed that 
matter and the physical universe were in their objec- 
tive reality, not grossly material and wholly differ- 
ent in nature from mind and thought, but were the 
creation, the product of mind and were of the nature 
of thought — not the creation or product of the human 
mind but of the divine mind — then her philosophy 
might claim the sanction of many of the most scholarly 
thinkers of today. In fact, many leading philoso- 
phers are agreed that this whole physical universe is 
not grossly material, wholly different from and inde- 
pendent of God's mind and thought, but is the direct 
projection or creation of God's thought, and that thus 
being the product of the mind and thought of God 
it is necessarily of the nature of thought, and there- 
fore, is capable of being understood and appreciated 
by intelligent thinking beings. They hold that God, 
in the mystery of his creation, has given to this pro- 
duct of his thought a permanence and a stability that 
is not ephemeral and fleeting, but more or less abiding, 
so that things have an abiding objective reality wholly 
independent of our thinking, and yet of such a nature 



58 RELIGIOUS TEACHINGS 

that the human mind can grasp and understand them. 
These minds, these souls of ours are also the creation 
of God's mind, and because they are created in his 
image they have the power to think and to understand 
and to know. And thus the human mind and the uni- 
verse about us, both being the creation of the divine 
Mind, have been so created that the human mind can 
grasp and understand the reality of the surrounding 
world. An impossible dualism in the world's life is 
thus avoided, and we have a philosophy that is in 
perfect harmony with Bible teaching and in perfect 
accord with the facts and experiences of human life. 
But this theory or philosophy is as wholly different 
from that of Mrs. Eddy as hers is different from the 
grossest and most literal materialism. This is in 
harmony with human intelligence and with divine 
creation; hers totally annihilates all human mind and 
all human intelligence, denies God's creatorship of the 
world and, in fact, denies all reality to the world itself. 



OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 59 

CHAPTER VI 

SOME CLAIMS BLASPHEMOUS 

To the one who believes in the Bible as the Word 
of God, and who believes in the New Testament con- 
ception of Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit, some 
claims of Mrs. Eddy and Christian Science must seem 
rankest blasphemy. It would be hard for him to think 
of them in any other way. Mrs. Eddy undoubtedly 
places her book, "Science and Health with Key to the 
Scriptures," on an equality, if not even above the Bible. 
It is always read when the Bible is read, and is as bind- 
ing on all Christian Scientists. She claims that it 
was literally dictated to her by God himself. In one 
place she says, "The works I have written on Christian 
Science contain absolute truth, and my necessity was 
to tell it. I was a scribe under orders, and who can 
refrain from transcribing what God indites?" In 
January, 1901, she said, speaking of her book, "I 
should blush to speak of Science and Health with Key 
to the Scriptures as I have were it of human origin, 
and I, apart from God, its author; but as I was only 
a scribe echoing the harmonies of heaven ... I can- 
not be supermodest." She often speaks of the mis- 



60 RELIGIOUS TEACHINGS 

takes and errors of the Bible, see 139 : i5f. On p. 527 : 
26, speaking of the Genesis account of creation, she 
goes even so far as to say, "Here the lie represents 
God as repeating creation," and again on p. 524 : 2J, 
speaking of a certain Bible statement she says, "It 
must be a lie." Yet she says of her own book, 547 : 3, 
"If one statement in this book is true, every one must 
be true." She claims that she has given a fuller revela- 
tion of God's truth to the world than did Jesus Christ. 
She says, 147 : 24, "Our Master healed the sick, prac- 
ticed Christian Healing, and taught the generalities 
of its divine principle ; but he left no definite rule for 
demonstrating this principle of healing. This rule 
remained to be discovered in Christian Science." She 
even goes so far as to say, 144 : 30, that "it is a ques- 
tion today whether ancient inspired healers understood 
the science of Christian healing." She claims that 
her book has to separate the truth of the Bible from 
its error. 548 : 3, "Christian Science separates error 
from truth, and breathes through the sacred pages the 
spiritual sense ..." Of Revelation io:if, where 
the Bible speaks of the angel who had a little book in 
his hand, Mrs. Eddy says, 558 : 9, "This angel or 
message which comes from God, clothed with a cloud, 
prefigures Divine Science," and implies that this little 
book is her Science and Health. She says, 559:2, 
"Did this little book contain the revelation of Divine 
Science" ? and then says, "Mortals, obey the heavenly 



OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 61 

angel. Take Divine Science. Read this book from 
beginning to end." 

It was shown earlier in this book that Mrs. Eddy 
denies the personality of Jesus Christ and makes him 
only the reflection of a principle. A further examina- 
tion of her teaching will show that she makes this 
principle, or rather reflection of a principle, this 
Christ, to be Christian Science. In one of the earlier 
editions of her book she says, "The second appearing 
of Jesus is unquestionably the second advent of the 
advancing idea of God as in Christian Science." On 
p. 134:21, she says, "The true Logos is demonstrably 
Christian Science." The term "logos," as is well 
known, is the Bible term used in the first chapter of 
John's Gospel for Christ. Again, she says, 107 : 7, 
speaking of the divine principle of healing, "This 
apodictical (self-evident) principle points to the reve- 
lation of Immanuel, 'God with us/ — the sovereign 
ever-presence." This term "Immanuel" is another 
Bible term applied to Jesus Christ. Dr. Fluno, to 
whom reference has been made, said in his Freeport 
address, "Christian Science is the Lamb of God that 
taketh away the sins of the world. It is the veritable 
Christ that has come the second time without sin unto 
salvation." In an illustrated poem entitled, "Christ 
and Christmas," written by Mrs. Eddy, published and 
copyrighted by her in 1894, there is a picture labeled 
"Christian Unity" in which Jesus is represented as 



62 RELIGIOUS TEACHINGS 

seated upon a stone holding the right hand of Mrs. 
Eddy, and about the head of each figure is a halo, 
showing that she placed herself on an equality with 
Jesus. What is such teaching as this if it is not blas- 
phemy ? 

The statements of Mrs. Eddy in regard to the Holy 
Ghost are equally blasphemous. On p. 331 : 31, she 
says, "God the Father-Mother; Christ, the spiritual 
idea of sonship; Divine Science or the Holy Com- 
forter — these three express in divine Science the three- 
fold, essential nature of the infinite." In her glossary, 
588 : 7, she gives the definition of the Holy Ghost as 
Divine Science. On p. 271 : 20, she says, "Our Master 
said, 'But the Comforter . . . shall teach you all 
things.' The Science of Christianity is the Comforter 
which leadeth into all truth." Again, on p. 43 : 7, 
she says, "The advent of this understanding is what is 
meant by the descent of the Holy Ghost — that influx 
of Divine Science which so illuminated the Pentecostal 
Day and is now repeating its ancient history." 46: 
30, "His (Christ's) students then received the Holy 
Ghost. By this is meant that by all they witnessed and 
suffered, they were aroused to an enlarged understand- 
ing of Divine Science." 562: 1, "John saw in those 
days the spiritual idea as the Messiah, who would 
baptize with the Holy Ghost — Divine Science." 55: 
27, " 'He shall give you another Comforter, that he 
may abide with you forever.' This Comforter I un- 



OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 63 

derstand to be Divine Science." 127: 28, "It (Divine 
Science) is a divine utterance, — the Comforter which 
leadeth into all truth." What could be ranker blas- 
phemy than this? Note what the Saviour said con- 
cerning blasphemy against the Holy Ghost : Matt. 12 : 
31, 32, "I say unto you, All manner of sins and blas- 
phemy shall be forgiven unto men ; but the blasphemy 
against the Holy Ghost shall not be forgiven unto 
men. And whosoever speaketh a word against the 
Son of Man it shall be forgiven him; but whosoever 
speaketh against the Holy Ghost, it shall never be 
forgiven him, neither in this world, neither in the 
world to come." Also, Mark 3 : 28, 29, "Verily, I say 
unto you, All sins shall be forgiven unto the sons of 
men and blasphemies wherewith soever they shall 
blaspheme; but he that shall blaspheme against the 
Holy Ghost hath never forgiveness, but is in danger 
of eternal damnation." What was their blasphemy? 
It was attributing the work of the Holy Spirit to an 
evil source, identifying the Holy Spirit with the Spirit 
of evil. Is not that what Mrs. Eddy and the Christian 
Scientists have been doing — identifying the Holy 
Ghost with this evil and unchristian doctrine which 
denies the personality of God, denies the personality 
of Jesus Christ, denies the personality of the Holy 
Ghost, denies the reality of sin and the need of a 
Saviour, denies the redemption and the atonement, 
denies in fact every fundamental belief of the Chris- 



64 RELIGIOUS TEACHINGS 

tian Religion? If these utterances which make the 
Holy Ghost to be this evil doctrine are not the sin 
against the Holy Ghost, they at least come danger- 
ously close to it. 

Summing it all up briefly, Christian Science denies 
the personality of God in any real sense of personality 
and makes him simply a principle to be understood — 
the principle love, truth, etc. It denies the personality 
of Jesus Christ, divides him into two, makes Christ 
to be simply a spiritual idea, a royal reflection of God 
or divine principle, and makes Jesus to be the human 
manifestation of this idea or reflection, whatever that 
may mean. It denies the death of Jesus Christ, the 
resurrection of Jesus Christ, and the atonement of 
Jesus Christ in any real sense of atonement for sin. 
It denies all reality to sin or evil, denies that there is 
any penalty or suffering or judgment for sin, denies 
all need of repentance for sin, denies forgiveness of 
sin, denies conversion, regeneration, adoption, and 
communion. It makes the Holy Spirit to be Christian 
Science. It makes prayer to be merely the intellectual 
understanding of a principle. It denies the personality 
and the mentality of man and makes him merely a 
reflection. It denies absolutely all reality to matter, 
to the human body, and to the whole physical universe, 
and makes them simply the imaginings of the mortal 
mind, and then denies that that mortal mind has any 
existence. Thus, as was intimated in the beginning, 



OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 65 

it denies every fundamental tenet of the Christian 
faith. It goes even farther and denies almost every 
fact, almost every belief or theory, upon which human 
knowledge or learning is based. 



PART II 
CHRISTIAN SCIENCE HEALING SYSTEM 



CHAPTER I 

ITS CLAIM TO BE A REVIVAL OF APOSTOLIC 
DIVINE HEALING 

The one claim of Christian Science that in all proba- 
bility appeals more strongly than any other to the 
great majority of people is its claim to divine heal- 
ing. A large number of the people who have gone 
into Christian Science have undoubtedly been people 
more or less sick who have been led into it with the 
hope of securing health. They have been Christian 
people who believed in the Bible and who believed 
that Christ has power to heal sickness as well as to 
forgive sins. Christian Science has come to them 
claiming to be a revival of the divine healing of 
apostolic times. It has said to them that Jesus healed 
people when he was here on earth, and his disciples 
after him healed the sick, cleansed the lepers, opened 
the eyes of the blind, and that they did this not with 
drugs, not with medicine, not by human surgery; 
which is all very true. 

This divine healing, it will be admitted by everyone, 
was a real part of early Christianity. Before Jesus 
left the earth he told his disciples to heal the sick, to 
69 



70 RELIGIOUS TEACHINGS 

cleanse the lepers, and to raise the dead, as well as to 
preach the gospel. And for a number of years after 
Jesus left this earth his disciples did heal the sick. 
But after two or three centuries the healing work of 
the church seemed to cease. Whether the church lost 
her divine power and forgot her divine injunction 
through lack of faith and increased worldly prosperity, 
or whether this special healing gift was given and in- 
tended as a special testimony for a special time in the 
beginning history of the church and was never in- 
tended to be permanent, is a question upon which 
people differ. But one thing is certain, whatever the 
cause, the divine healings of the early apostolic church 
have not continued down through the centuries. Chris- 
tian Scientists say that Mrs. Eddy and Christian 
Science are bringing back this lost power and truth of 
Jesus Christ and the early church, and that Christian 
Science is really a revival of early apostolic religion 
with its accompanying physical healing. This is un- 
doubtedly a strong appeal and it is not to be wondered 
at that many earnest, sincere, Christian people who 
believe in the Bible, who believe that Jesus Christ did 
heal, and healed without medicine, and who believe 
that he has just as much power to heal now as he had 
then, are led into Christian Science by the seeming 
plausibility of their claim. But let us examine this 
claim and see if the purported Christian Science heal- 
ings are in any sense like the healings of Jesus and of 



OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 71 

his disciples ; whether the way the Christian Scientists 
attempt to heal people to-day is in any sense similar to 
the way that Jesus and the early disciples healed; 
whether their purported healings can at all be called 
divine healings; and, in fact, whether they are really 
producing results in any measure comparable to those 
of Jesus and his disciples, or are producing results of 
healing at all worthy of mention. 



72 RELIGIOUS TEACHINGS 



CHAPTER II 

UNDERLYING PRINCIPLES DIFFERENT 

FROM THOSE OF CHRIST AND THE 

EARLY CHURCH 

Careful study will show that the underlying princi- 
ples of Christian Science healings are wholly differ- 
ent from those of Jesus Christ and of the early disci- 
ples. These early healings were accomplished not by 
the use of drugs, not by human surgery. That will 
be admitted by everyone. Jesus healed by his own 
innate divine power. He seemed to be a perfect mas- 
ter over nature, disease, sin, and death, and by his 
own will power, his own inner divine energy, he con- 
quered. He spoke to the storm out on the little lake 
and immediately it ceased, so that the disciples said, 
"What manner of man is this, that even the winds 
and the sea obey him!" He said to the man sick of 
the palsy, "Thy sins be forgiven thee," and when the 
bystanders criticised him he said, "Whether is it easier 
to say, Thy sins be forgiven thee, or to say, Rise up 
and walk? But that ye may know that the Son of 
man hath power on earth to forgive sins, I say unto 
thee, Arise, and take up thy bed." When the cen- 
turion came to Jesus telling of his servant that was 
sick Jesus said, "I will come and heal him." The 



OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 73 

centurion said, "I am not worthy that thou shouldst 
come under my roof, but speak the word only, and my 
servant shall be healed. For I also am a man under 
authority, and I say to one, Go, and he goeth ; to an- 
other, Come, and he cometh; and to my servant, Do 
this, and he doeth it," and Jesus commended him for 
this remarkable faith in his divine power. Of the 
woman who touched his garment and was healed he 
said, "I perceive that virtue has gone out of me." 
.Thus Jesus himself, as a divine personal being, by his 
own will power healed the sick. He spoke as one in 
authority, as one who has power to do what he wills. 
The leper said to him, "If thou wilt thou canst make 
me clean." Jesus said, "I will, be thou clean." To the 
sick damsel he said, "I say unto thee arise," to the 
demoniac he said, "Come out of the man, thou un- 
clean spirit ;" to the man with a withered hand he said, 
"Stretch forth thy hand" ; to the woman who had an 
infirmity eighteen years and was bowed together he 
said, "Woman, thou art loosed from thine infirmity" ; 
to the blind man, "Receive thy sight" ; to the dead son 
of the widow of Nain, "Young man, I say unto thee, 
arise" ; to the dead Lazarus, "Lazarus, come forth." 

The disciples also healed, not by getting people to 
understand the truth, or to understand some system 
of philosophy or religion, but either by a special divine 
power given to them by Jesus Christ or by invoking 
the divine power of Jesus Christ himself. When 



74 RELIGIOUS TEACHINGS 

Jesus sent out his disciples he sent them forth "to 
preach and to have power to heal sickness and to cast 
out devils." He sent out the disciples two by two and 
"gave them power over unclean spirits." He called 
his disciples and "gave them power and authority over 
all devils and to cure diseases." And again he says, 
"Behold, / give unto you power to tread on serpents 
and scorpions and over all of the power of the enemy." 
The book of Acts tells that "Stephen, full of faith and 
power, did great wonders and miracles among the peo- 
ple"; and that the "Lord gave testimony to the word 
of his grace and granted signs and wonders to be done 
by the disciples' hands"; and again it says that "God 
wrought special miracles by the hand of Paul." To 
the evil spirit of the damsel Paul said, "I command 
thee, in the name of Jesus Christ, to come out of her." 
To the cripple, Peter said, "In the name of Jesus 
Christ of Nazareth, rise up and walk." At the death 
of Dorcas "Peter kneeled down and prayed, and turn- 
ing him to the body, said, Tabitha, arise." To Elymas, 
the sorcerer, Paul said, "Behold the hand of the Lord 
is upon thee, and thou shalt be blind." James said, 
"The prayer of faith shall heal the sick, and the Lord 
will raise him up." Thus in all these cases the healing 
was accomplished either by this special divine power 
granted to the disciples by Jesus Christ, or else by 
the direct power of Jesus Christ in answer to the faith 
and prayer of the disciples. 



OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 75 

Compare with this New Testament method the 
Christian Science method of healing. What is it that 
brings healing to the Christian Science patient ? Is it 
faith in the power of Jesus Christ to heal ? No. Mrs. 
Eddy says, 167: 3f, "If we rise no higher than blind 
faith the science of healing is not attained." 15 : 28, 
"Understanding, and not belief, gains the ear and 
right hand of omnipotence . . . and calls the infinite 
blessing." 487 : 30, "Faith relies upon an understood 
principle. This principle makes whole the diseased." 
488: 11, "The Scriptures often appear, in our common 
version, to approve and endorse belief when they mean 
to enforce the necessity of understanding." Is it in 
answer to the patient's prayer, to his asking God for 
healing, that God by his divine power heals? No. 
Mrs. Eddy says, 167:1, "Should we implore a 
corporeal God to heal the sick of his personal volition, 
or should we understand the infinite divine principle 
which heals?" It is the principle that heals and not 
the will of God. 146 : 15, "Scholasticism clings for 
salvation to the person, instead of to the divine Princi- 
ple of the man Jesus; and his Science, the curative 
agent of God, is thus silenced." The following quota- 
tion from a recent pamphlet entitled, "Christian Science 
— Its Advantage to Mankind," by Edward A. Kim- 
ball, C.S.D., a prominent Christian Science official, is 
here given to show that Mrs. Eddy's meaning has not 
been misrepresented. He says, "Instead of being the 



76 RELIGIOUS TEACHINGS 

prayer of petition it is the prayer or mental modus of 
demonstration." "Instead of asking God to interpose 
and heal the sick by way of response to prayer, the 
work in Christian Science is in recognition of the fact 
that all . . . necessary to the healing of the sick has 
ever existed and needs only to be realized and ap- 
propriated by humanity." 

In fact, anyone who reads Mrs. Eddy's book at all 
carefully will see all the way through it that what she 
calls divine healing is not in any way or in any sense 
healing by a special act of divine will or by the exer- 
cise of divine power. In Christian Science neither God 
nor Jesus Christ heals anybody. Rather the patient 
heals himself through and by his understanding of 
truth, of divine principle. It is truth that heals, and 
not a divine person. It is the understanding of this 
truth, this principle, that brings health to the sick, 
and not the divine power of a personal Jesus Christ, 
exerted because of the faith or prayer of the individ- 
ual. Hundreds of quotations from Mrs. Eddy's book 
might be given to show that this is the Christian 
Science conception, but a few will suffice. She says, 
146:24, "The divine origin of Science is demon- 
strated through the holy influence of truth in healing 
sickness and sin." 171 : 28, "The truth that life and 
intelligence are spiritual, never material, destroys sin, 
sickness, and death." 126:24, "I have demonstrated 
through the mind the effects of truth on the health." 



OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 77 

135 : I2f, "When truth heals the sick it casts out evils, 
and when truth casts out the evil called disease, it 
heals the sick." 167 : 30, "Only from radical reliance 
on truth can scientific healing power be realized." 
144:27, "When the science of being is universally 
understood, every man will be his own physician, and 
truth will be the universal panacea." 

Of course it is the understanding of this truth, this 
principle, that really brings the healing benefit to the 
patient. 16 : 20, "Only as we rise above all sensuous- 
ness and sin can we reach the heaven-born aspiration 
and spiritual consciousness . . . which understand- 
ing heals the sick." 14 : 25, "Entirely separate from 
the belief and dream of material living is the divine 
life, revealing spiritual understanding and the con- 
sciousness of man's dominion over the whole earth. 
This understanding casts out error and heals the sick." 
Mrs. Eddy even claims that the healings in Christ's 
time were due not to Christ's divine power or volition, 
but to the power of truth and its understanding. She 
says, 136:2, "He (Christ) taught his followers that 
his religion had a divine principle which would cast 
out error and heal both the sick and the sinning." 
137:1, "His (Christ's) students saw this power of 
truth heal the sick." 138:30, "It was this theology 
of Jesus which healed the sick and the sinning. It 
is this theology in this book (Science and Health) and 
the spiritual meaning of this theology which heals the 



78 RELIGIOUS TEACHINGS 

sick." 141 : 13, "In healing the sick and sinning Jesus 
elaborated the fact that the healing effect followed the 
understanding of the divine principle." 146 : 24, 
"This healing power of truth must have been far 
anterior to the period in which Jesus lived." 

What is this truth, this divine principle, in Chris- 
tian Science that heals the sick? Briefly, it is this. 
God is all. God is spirit. And since God is all, there- 
fore, everything that is, is spirit. Matter has no 
reality ; our physical bodies are not real ; they have no 
true existence and are but creations of the mortal 
mind. Matter has no mind ; therefore, it cannot suffer 
pain or be sick. Again God is perfect, and since the 
real man is God's reflection he too must be perfect, 
and cannot be imperfect, sick, or sinful. Hence sick- 
ness and disease have no reality, are but false beliefs, 
and need but to be detected as such, declared so, and 
then forgotten. This is the truth, the divine principle, 
that underlies all Christian Science healing. It is the 
understanding of this truth, this principle, that heals. 
And the work of the practitioner is to get people to 
understand this truth, this divine principle. 

The following passages from Mrs. Eddy's book will 
show her theory that sickness and disease are unreal 
and are but false beliefs of mortal mind. 169: 10, 
"Disease has a mental origin." 166 : 2, "The human 
mind is all that can produce pain." 153: 22, "This so- 
called mind makes its own pain." 159:30, "A man's 



OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 79 

belief produces disease and all its symptoms." 153 : 18, 
"A boil simply manifests, through inflammation and 
swelling, a belief in pain, and this belief is called a 
boil." 153:26, "We have small-pox because others 
have it; but mortal mind, not matter, contains and 
carries the infection." 161 : 3, "We say, I burn my 
finger. That is an exact statement, mortal mind and 
not matter burns it." 423:27, "Ossification, or any 
abnormal condition or derangement of the body is as 
directly the action of the mortal mind, as is dementia 
or insanity. Bones have only the substance of thought 
which forms them. They are only phenomena of the 
minds of mortals." 

That her conception of God's allness, his spiritual 
nature and his perfection, and hence man's spiritual 
nature and perfection as God's idea or reflection, to- 
gether with her conception of the unreality of matter, 
disease, and sickness — that this is the truth that under- 
lies all her healing will be seen from the following 
statements. 200:9, "Life is, always has been, and 
ever will be independent of matter, for life is God 
and man is the idea of God . . . not subject to 
decay." 424 : 5, "Under divine providence there can 
be no accidents, since there is no room for imperfec- 
tion in perfection." 428 : 22, "The science of being 
reveals man as perfect even as the Father in heaven 
is perfect." 302 : 19, "He (man) is above sin or 
frailty." 480 : 19, "Man is incapable of sin, sickness, 



80 RELIGIOUS TEACHINGS 

and death." Preface, XL:9f, "The physical healing 
of Christian Science results now as in Jesus' time, 
from the operation of divine principle before which 
sin and disease lose their reality. . ." 428 : 30, 
"The author has healed hopeless organic disease and 
raised the dying to life and health through the under- 
standing of God as the only life." 450 : 19, "The 
Christian Scientist will overcome evil, disease, and 
death by understanding their nothingness and the all- 
ness of God or good." 482 : 27, "Christian Science 
is the law of Truth which heals the sick on the basis 
of one mind or God. It can heal in no other way." 
460 : 5, "Our system of mind healing rests on the 
apprehension of the nature and essence of all being 
— on the divine mind and love's essential qualities." 

In the practical application of the understanding of 
this truth, this divine principle, in the cure of disease, 
two methods are used with more or less confusion. 
First, the mortal mind may by its own belief or will 
power overcome pain or sickness. Whatever good is 
done by drugs or medicine or surgery, Mrs. Eddy 
claims, is due to this mortal mind's activity. She says : 
169 : 23, "It is mortal mind, not matter, which brings 
to the sick whatever good they may seem to receive 
from drugs." 174:22, "Mortal belief is all that en- 
ables a drug to cure mortal ailments." As was stated 
earlier, Mrs. Eddy claims that this mortal mind which 
produces the mortal body has absolute control over it. 



OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 81 

She says, 162 : 12, "Experiments have favored the 
fact that mind governs the body, not in one instance, 
but in every instance." 220 : 30, "Mortal mind . . . 
controls the stomach, bones, lungs, heart, blood, etc., 
as directly as the volition or will moves the hand." 
And, of course, a mind that has such absolute control 
as that can by its own will power banish disease, if 
it so chooses. But that is not Christian Science heal- 
ing. Mrs. Eddy says, 144 : 14, "Human will-power 
is not Science. Human will belongs to the so-called 
material senses, and its use is to be condemned." 
144 : 20, "Truth, and not corporeal will, is the divine 
power which says to disease, peace, be still." 

The second or real method of Christian Science 
healing is to understand the truth, the divine principle 
that man, being God's reflection, image, cannot have 
material disease; that man, as God's reflection was, 
is, and always will be perfect, and therefore cannot 
have any imperfection, disease, or pain — and the un- 
derstanding of this truth, this principle, will banish 
disease permanently and all one needs to do then is to 
go ahead and forget it. She says, 453 : 29, "A Chris- 
tian Scientist's medicine is mind, the divine Truth, 
that makes man free." 14: 12, "Become conscious 
for a single moment that life and intelligence are 
purely spiritual, neither in nor of matter, and the body 
then will utter no complaint. If suffering from a 
belief in sickness, you will find yourself suddenly 



82 RELIGIOUS TEACHINGS 

well." 120: 15, "The divine Principle of Science, re- 
versing the testimony of the physical senses, reveals 
man as harmoniously existent in Truth, which is the 
only basis of health; and this Science denies all dis- 
ease." 376: 21, "The efficient remedy is to destroy the 
patient's false belief by both silently and audibly 
arguing the true facts in regard to harmonious being." 
424 : 28, "To prevent or to cure scrofula and other 
so-called hereditary diseases, you must destroy the 
belief in these ills and the faith in the possibility of 
their transmission." 425 : 6, "If the case to be 
mentally treated is consumption, take up the leading 
points included (according to belief) in this disease. 
Show that it is not inherited, that inflammation, 
tubercles, hemorrhage, and decomposition are beliefs, 
images of the mortal thought superimposed upon the 
body, that they are not the truth of man, that they 
should be treated as error and put out of thought. 
Then these ills will disappear." 375 : 23, "Destroy the 
belief, show mortal mind that muscles have no power 
to be lost, for mind is supreme, and you cure the 
palsy." 447 : 27, "The sick are not healed merely by 
declaring that there is no sickness, but by knowing 
that there is none." 426: 11, "If belief in death were 
obliterated and the understanding obtained that there 
is no death, this would be a 'tree of life.' " 165 : 19, 
"Your remedy lies in forgetting the whole thing; for 
matter has no sensation of its own, and the human 



OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 83 

mind is all that can produce pain." She says, 446 : 5, 
"A thorough perusal of the author's publications heals 
sickness." And the way it heals is that it leads to an 
understanding of this truth, this divine principle. 

Thus we are led to see that the method of Chris- 
tian Science healing is absolutely different from the 
method of healing used either by Jesus Christ or by 
his followers. Jesus healed by his own divine power, 
because he was master over disease. The healings of 
the early church were always through and by the 
power of the divine Christ. Neither Jesus nor his 
disciples ever asked for any understanding of truth 
or of principle or of anything else on the part of the 
one healed. Jesus did in some instances commend 
their faith, but their faith was a trust in him and in 
his divine power to heal, and not a mere understand- 
ing of the unreality of disease, or the allness of God, 
or the perfection of the real man. How could the 
dead son of the widow of Nain or the dead Lazarus 
be raised to life by their understanding of a principle? 
The fact is, there is absolutely nothing in common 
between the Christian Science method of healing and 
that of Jesus and his disciples. In no intelligent sense 
can Christian Science healing, which is merely the 
understanding of a principle, be called divine healing. 
Neither God nor Jesus Christ, as personal beings, have 
anything whatever to do with any Christian Science 
healing. There is no exercise of divine power what- 



84 RELIGIOUS TEACHINGS 

ever. How could there be if disease has no reality 
whatever and is only a false belief of the mortal mind 
to be understood and then forgotten? 

In actual practice the method of Christian Science 
healing, in some respects at least, is not far removed 
from the old heathenish incantations of the witches 
and wizards and fetish doctors that were indulged in 
during the dark ages and that even now are still prac- 
ticed among some of the most uncivilized peoples of 
Africa, India, and the South Sea Islands, and among 
some of the savage or half-civilized tribes of Amer- 
ican Indians. These witches and wizards went over 
and over their weird and monotonous incantations as 
a magic to drive away disease and sickness. We 
laugh at, or else deplore, the awful ignorance and 
superstition of people who would think that any such 
incantations could cure anybody. Yet how different 
are the people of this twentieth century of Christian 
civilization who, when they are sick, have a Christian 
Science healer come and say over them a lot of magic 
phrases, or even more absurd, who pay a Christian 
Science healer fifty or one hundred miles away, to go 
over a lot of Christian Science incantations as an 
absent treatment to cure their diseases? Of course 
the Christian Scientist will say that it is not an in- 
cantation, but really wherein is the difference? The 
healer goes into her room, shuts the door, reads Mrs. 
Eddy's book for a while and then commences to say 



OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 85 

over to herself — "God is all. God is spirit. There- 
fore everything is spirit, and there is no matter, no 
material body, no material disease, no sickness. He 
is not sick. He is not sick. He is not sick. God is 
all. God is good. Therefore everything that is, is 
good. There is no evil. There is no sickness because 
sickness is evil. He is not sick. He is not sick. He 
is not sick." And thus for an hour or two either in 
silence or in a mumbling sing-song voice the healer 
goes over and over and over some such incantation, 
and expects that this will drive away the sickness 
and disease. Someone may say that it is the under- 
standing on the part of the patient that "God is all, 
and that God is good, and that therefore, there can be 
no evil, no sickness/' that heals him. But Christian 
Scientists say they can cure, by absent treatment, peo- 
ple who do not know they are treating them, or who 
do not believe in their teachings. How will a healer's 
understanding that "God is all, etc.," and his going 
over and over that incantation, fifty miles away, affect 
the patient's understanding? In Freeport, Illinois, a 
Christian Science healer read Mrs. Eddy's book to a 
sick horse, and for hours went over and over this 
jargon and incantation until the horse died. Did she 
think the horse would understand what she was read- 
ing or saying ? This same healer, an intelligent woman 
on other things, gave absent treatments, that is, went 
over and over this Christian Science incantation for 



86 RELIGIOUS TEACHINGS 

a sick man two days after he had died. She had not 
heard of his death. 

The author of this book sometimes wonders where 
is our boasted twentieth century civilization, where is 
our enlightened Christianity, when we will practice 
or tolerate and excuse such heathenism, such ignorance 
and superstition. 

Some good Christian people who do not understand 
the underlying principles and practices of Christian 
Science may think that the author has not been fair, 
and has not truly represented what the Christian 
Science healers have been doing in their absent treat- 
ments, or in any of their treatments. In spite of all 
that has been said in this chapter thus far, in spite 
of all the quotations from Mrs. Eddy's book showing 
that Christian Scientists never pray God to heal the 
sick by his divine power, yet no doubt, there will be 
some who will still think that whatever may be their 
theories the actual healers do pray for the sick, and 
that in their absent treatments they are merely pray- 
ing God to heal. No doubt, some may say they have 
with their own eyes seen the healers praying. We 
grant that the reader may have seen them doing what 
he thought was praying, and even what the healers 
may have said was praying, but if one will insist that 
the healers make their prayers audible and distinct so 
that they can be heard, he will soon discover that 
there is no prayer in the sense of asking God or Jesus 



OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 87 

Christ to heal or to help by his divine power, but 
rather a going over and over of some such phrases or 
sentences as mentioned above. 

But even granting for the moment that the healer 
does pray in the sense that the ordinary Christian 
prays, are we not drifting afar from the example of 
our Christ and of his disciples when we are willing 
to pay so much an hour for some one to pray for us ? 
Is it not a travesty on prayer? Does it not approach 
pretty close to blasphemy? What would be thought 
of a Christian minister who would announce that he 
was going into the business of praying for sick peo- 
ple at so much an hour? What impression would it 
make upon the reader if he should see in the daily 
paper or in a bulletin left at his door some such adver- 
tisement as the following : 

Rev. , Specialist on Prayer Healing — Moderate Rates. 

People who are sick call upon him. 

Pray for you ten minutes, $1.00, thirty minutes, $3.00, full 

hour, $5.00. (Reduced rates by the hour.) 

Then another preacher comes out in competition, 
and this advertisement appears : 

Rev. , Healer. Prayer for the sick at cut rates. 

Ten minutes, 50cts., thirty minutes, $1.25, full hour, $2.00. 

Prolonged cases like Tuberculosis or Cancer, — rates still 

further reduced. 

Is not the absurdity and even the blasphemy of the 
whole thing apparent? Where are we drifting to 



88 RELIGIOUS TEACHINGS 

when we get to the place where we begin commercial- 
izing prayer and making it a means of monetary gain ? 
When we begin making a money charge for asking 
God to do a helpful deed to a fellow man ? The Ger- 
man Reformation under Martin Luther was a revolt 
against the awful and diabolical practice of selling 
indulgences. The priest or pope claimed that he had 
special power and privilege with God, and for certain 
sums of money he would secure from God forgiveness 
for any sins that the purchasers might have com- 
mitted, or that they might want to commit. Are we 
going back to that diabolical practice again? Are 
we going to say that certain Christian Science or 
New Thought or Unity healers have special power 
and favor with God in prayer, and that we will pay 
them so much per hour to pray and secure this favor 
of God for us? Where will this thing end? May not 
some one to-morrow say that he has special power 
with Jesus Christ to secure his redemptive work for 
the soul, and begin charging five hundred or a thou- 
sand dollars apiece for praying souls into heaven? 
Would not this be just as sane, just as reasonable, 
and just as Christian? 



OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 89 

CHAPTER III 
DIFFERENT MODE OF HEALING 

The manner of healing in Christ's day was wholly 
different from that of the Christian Scientists. The 
healings then were not done in secret and told about 
afterward. The healings were done openly and in 
public, many of them in the presence of great throngs 
of people who were disbelievers. And the cures were of 
such a nature that there could be no question about 
them, — no partial cures, not just improvement, but 
cures absolute and complete. Then the cures were 
effected immediately, not gradually or through long 
periods of time. Notice in almost every account of New 
Testament healing such words as these: "And im- 
mediately the leprosy was cleansed," "And straight- 
way the damsel arose," "And immediately she was 
made straight," "And immediately he received his 
sight," "And he that was dead sat up," "And immedi- 
ately the man was made whole," "And immediately 
his feet and ankle-bones received strength," "And he 
leaped and walked," "And immediately there fell on 
him a mist and darkness," "And he came out the 
same hour," "And he that was dead came forth." 

But how is it with the professed Christian Science 



90 RELIGIOUS TEACHINGS 

healings of to-day? Is there any similarity what- 
ever to these New Testament healings ? Are its heal- 
ings done openly so that people can see and know? 
The author has heard a number of people say that 
they had been healed of some disease, but he never 
saw one healed. Are the Christian Science healings 
absolute and complete, or are the patients simply im- 
proved ? The author has known several people to die 
of the very disease of which they and the Christian 
Science people claimed they had been healed. Are 
these cures effected by Christian Science healers im- 
mediate? Do they come to a lame man and say, Rise 
and walk, and does he immediately jump up and leap 
and run before everyone? Do they touch the eyes of 
a man totally blind and say, Be opened, and immedi- 
ately is the blind man able to see perfectly? Do they 
go into the room where a Tabitha is dead, or is lying 
at the point of death and, kneeling down by the bed- 
side, pray to Jesus Christ and then, arising from 
prayer, take the hand of the dead or dying woman and 
say, Arise; and does she immediately rise up before 
them all completely and entirely restored to life and 
health? The reader is left to answer these ques- 
tions for himself. So far as the author has observed 
or has been able to learn, it is always a long process 
of treatments at three or five dollars a treatment; 
and if there be any healing or improvement at all it 
is only after a long period of these treatments. 



OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 91 

CHAPTER IV 

DIFFERENT KIND OF DISEASES HEALED 

Even though it be granted that some people have 
been healed by Christian Science methods, yet an 
honest examination will show that the kind of diseases 
healed by Christian Science practitioners to-day is 
entirely different from the kind of diseases healed by 
Jesus Christ and his disciples. Most of the cases 
mentioned in the New Testament were cases of the 
most serious nature, many of them diseases that to all 
human power and skill not only then but even now, 
with all our modern medicine and surgery, are abso- 
lutely incurable. There was the man born blind 
whom the Saviour healed. And the man in astonish- 
ment and wonder said, "Since the world began was it 
not heard that any man opened the eyes of one born 
blind." There were the man with the withered hand 
— the man with the palsy — the deaf and dumb man 
— the woman who had an infirmity eighteen years, 
who was bowed together and could not lift herself 
up — the man crippled for thirty years — the demoniac 
— the lepers — the man lame from birth — the cripple 
who never had walked, whose limbs were withered 



92 RELIGIOUS TEACHINGS 

and dried up — the dead son of the widow of Nain — 
Lazarus who had been four days in his grave and 
whose body had already begun to decay. Has the 
reader ever known any such cures to be wrought by 
Christian Science? The author of this book has not. 
He has known at least a hundred different persons 
who have taken up Christian Science and who have 
been treated by Christian Science practitioners, but 
has never known one with any serious disease to be 
healed, and not one to be really helped. Christian 
Scientists make claim to all sorts of cures and the 
author would not say that no one has ever been cured 
or helped by their treatment ; but he does say that he 
personally has never known one who was seriously 
or dangerously sick, who had any kind of organic 
disease, or who was crippled or injured in any way, 
to have been cured or to have been really helped ; and 
it would seem if there be any real virtue, any real 
curative power or efficacy in it, out of all the persons 
the author has known to try it, at least one would 
have been helped if not cured. 

Mrs. Eddy claimed, and her followers claimed for 
her, that she had cured some of the most serious 
diseases — cancer that had eaten into the jugular vein, 
consumption when the substance of the lungs was 
almost gone, bones that were decayed, etc. But 
strange she never gave any names or dates or localities 
or any substantial thing so that her cures could be 



OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 93 

investigated, and this notwithstanding she was urged 
to do so time and again. On January first, 1899, Dr. 
Charles A. L. Reed, a prominent physician of Cincin- 
nati, publicly through the press, challenged Mrs. 
Eddy to prove or demonstrate the truth of her miracu- 
lous cures. He offered to furnish her cases identical 
with those she said she had healed and declared if 
she would heal any one of them he would become her 
follower and devote the remainder of his life to her 
cause. Her only answer was absolute silence. If 
Mrs. Eddy really had the power to heal anybody it 
seems as though she would have used it in healing 
those nearest and dearest to her. But in the year 1892 
the widow of Mrs. Eddy's brother died of cancer of 
the breast. She and Mrs. Eddy were the dearest of 
friends, and at Mrs. Eddy's request she tried Chris- 
tian Science, but received no benefit whatever and 
died while still being treated by a Christian Science 
healer. If Mrs. Eddy could heal as she professed 
why did she not heal her own granddaughter, the child 
of her only son, when the father piteously appealed 
to her to do so? Why did she permit her third hus- 
band to die of heart disease if her treatment could 
have saved him? Why did she not heal Mrs. Leonard, 
a devoted Christian Scientist, who had slaved in her 
home for years and who had, during many of these 
years, suffered from diabetes; and why did she turn 
her out of her home at Concord just a little while 



94 RELIGIOUS TEACHINGS 

before she died of that dread disease? If she could 
heal any one why did she not heal Joseph Armstrong, 
one of her best friends, a leader in her church from 
its foundation and her personal business manager, 
who had helped to make multiplied thousands of 
dollars for her? Why did she let him die of pleurisy 
in the spring of 1907? She tried to heal her coach- 
man, and claimed that he was completely cured, but 
strange it was he died in her home shortly afterward 
of the very disease from which she cured him. 
Edward E. Kimball, her close personal friend and the 
leading lecturer of Christian Science, died unhelped 
by her or any of her healers. Alfred Farlow, the 
official spokesman of Christian Science and its leading 
press agent, admitted under oath during a trial, that 
he did not know of any cure of any organic disease 
ever having been made by Mrs. Eddy in her life, ex- 
cept once when she healed a stiff leg. The question 
must arise in some minds, If Mrs. Eddy had such 
power to heal, and if sickness and death are only the 
result of false belief, why did Mrs. Eddy die? Why 
did she not heal her own self? Over and over again 
Christian Science healers have been urged to give 
some resonable proof of their cures, or to give an 
actual demonstration before reputable physicians or 
before even intelligent business men, but never will 
they do it. Mr. Frederick W. Peabody, an eminent 
lawyer of Boston, who for years has made a study 



OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 95 

of Christian Science, and from whose book, "The 
Religio-Medical * Masquerade," many of the facts in 
this chapter have been taken, says, "There has never 
yet been a scientifically established Christian Science 
cure." It is admitted by every one that the mind 
has influence over the body, and that many of our 
little aches and pains and sicknesses can be overcome 
by getting our minds on something else; and further 
it is admitted that all nervous affections and diseases 
directly or indirectly due to nervous condition can 
be and are often helped and even cured by a change 
of mental condition and outlook ; and in such cases as 
these it is admitted that any theory, however absurd, 
that helps to take the mind off of one's self is certain 
to produce beneficial results. But further than this 
it is doubtful if many people have ever seen or experi- 
enced decidedly helpful results from Christian Science 
treatment. 

No doubt some people with more serious diseases, 
who have been treated by Christian Scientists, have 
got well. But that has not necessarily been due to 
the Christian Science treatment. It is a known fact 
to all physicians and to most thinking people that 
nature is itself a great physician, and that in time many 
of our ills, and some of our most serious ones, will, 
even if let absolutely alone, disappear of their own 
accord without treatment of any kind. If there were 
no physicians, no medicine, no healers aside from 



96 RELIGIOUS TEACHINGS 

nature, not all seriously sick people would die. In 
India, in Africa, in parts of China, and in other coun- 
tries where they have no physicians and no Christian 
Science healers, not all seriously sick people die. Some 
of these sick people get well. Hence it is not to be 
wondered at that some people, treated by Christian 
Science or by witchcraft or by any other foolish 
method, will ultimately get well. But that does not 
signify that the Christian Science or the witchcraft 
cured them. Many of these people would undoubtedly 
have got well just the same without any such treat- 
ment, or without any treatment. 

The following incident that the author personally 
knows of took place a short time ago, and will show 
the futility of expecting the Christian Science healers 
to really demonstrate or to prove their claim to any 
except those overwilling to believe anything and to 
accept any kind of evidence. A Christian Science 
healer was talking with a man who seemed somewhat 
inclined toward Christian Science. She was telling 
him of its wonderful cures, and of remarkable cures 
that she herself had been able to perform. He listened 
very interestedly for a while and then said, "Do you 
actually believe what you have been saying to me?" 
She said she certainly did. He said, "Do you accept 
money for your cures ?" She said, "O yes." He then 
took out his check book and said, "I have a thousand 
dollars here that I will gladly give to you if you will 



OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 97 

demonstrate and prove to me that you can do what 
you say." He said, "Here is a pin. Take this and 
scratch the back of my hand until it bleeds. Then 
if you, by your Christian Science method, will cure 
that scratch and take away the scar inside of an hour 
I will write you a check for one thousand dollars." 
She said, "No, she would not try it because he was a 
disbeliever and one had to have faith in order to be 
cured." Then he replied, "Let me take the pin and 
make a scratch across the back of your hand, and if 
you will cure that and take away the mark inside of an 
hour, I will give you the thousand dollars." He said, 
"Surely you believe and have faith enough to cure 
your own self." But she would not try it. Why? 
Because she knew she could not do it, and no other 
Christian Science healer from Mrs. Eddy down could 
have done it. If they could not cure a little pin 
scratch, a thing so small and insignificant, how could 
they cure a serious case of cancer, or a serious case of 
tuberculosis when part of the substance of the lungs is 
gone, or a case of decayed bone, or a broken limb, 
or a blind eye ? 



98 RELIGIOUS TEACHINGS 

CHAPTER V 
DIFFERENT SPIRIT AND MOTIVE 

The spirit and motive that actuated Jesus and his 
disciples in their healings were surely decidedly dif- 
ferent from the spirit and motive of Mrs. Eddy and 
her followers. Can it ever be found where there was 
a selfish motive back of the New Testament healings ? 
Did Jesus or his disciples ever exact money or even re- 
ceive money for their healings ? It cannot be found so. 
Jesus healed because he had compassion on the poor, 
suffering people about him, and because he desired to 
lead them to believe in his divine nature and power so 
that he might give to them, not only physical healing, 
but spiritual life. He was wholly unselfish, and, so 
far as we have any record, so were also the disciples 
and early Christians who healed. 

But not so with Mrs. Eddy and the Christian 
Science healers. There are few, if any, even attempts 
at healing, without money. Mrs. Eddy in one place 
says, "Christian Science demonstrates that the patient 
who pays what he is able for being healed is more 
apt to recover than he who withholds the slight equiva- 
lent for health." The people who have had prac- 



OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 99 

titioners come into their homes in the times of sick- 
ness, know that they do not come without being paid 
for it. In fact, the whole system of Christian Science 
is one gigantic, commercial, money-making scheme. 
In a few years, from a poor woman, Mrs. Eddy be- 
came a millionaire, and that not by voluntary con- 
tributions and gifts, but by money charged and exacted 
from her students, she sometimes even going to law 
to compel them to pay the entire amount charged; 
and from the sale of her book and other writings. 
As in the fable of old, everything she touched turned 
to gold. She charged her students three hundred 
dollars in advance for seven lessons and gave those 
seven lessons in one week — not a bad income when 
one thinks that she often had twenty or thirty stu- 
dents in a week. She herself said that in seven years 
she had four thousand students — four thousand, at 
three hundred dollars apiece, or one million two hun- 
dred thousand dollars in seven years, just from her 
students alone. To shield herself from censure as 
a miserly, exacting woman, on account of this ex- 
orbitant charge, she claimed that God compelled her 
to do it. In her book "Retrospection and Introspec- 
tion" she says, "When God compelled me to set a 
price on Christian Science mind healing I could think 
of no financial equivalent for the impartation of a 
knowledge of that divine power which heals, but I 
was led to name three hundred dollars as the price for 



ioo RELIGIOUS TEACHINGS 

each pupil." Compare with this Peter's words to 
Simon the Sorcerer in the eighth chapter of Acts. 
When Simon saw the marvelous healings wrought 
through the power of the Holy Ghost, he offered Peter 
money, saying, "Give me also this power." But Peter 
said unto him, "Thy money perish with thee, because 
thou hast thought that the gift of God may be pur- 
chased with money. Repent therefore of this thy 
wickedness." Compare with this the story of Gehazi, 
in 2 Kings 5, who was punished by being afflicted 
with leprosy because he asked a gift of Naaman for 
the divine healing Naaman had received. 

Every Christian Scientist is expected and really 
required to buy Mrs. Eddy's book, Science and Health 
with Key to the Scriptures. She says, 456 : 25, "A 
Christian Scientist requires my book 'Science and 
Health with Key to the Scriptures' for his text book 
as do all students and patients." Again, in an article 
in the Christian Science Journal, of March, 1897, 
signed by herself, she writes, "It shall be the duty of 
all Christian Scientists to circulate and to sell as many 
of these books as they can. If a member of the First 
Church of Christ, Scientist, shall fail to obey this 
injunction, it will render him liable to lose his mem- 
bership in this church." Thus she required every 
practitioner, healer, lecturer, and even every member 
of her church to become a canvasser for her book. 
Every practitioner is required to keep these books on 



OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 101 

hand and to sell them whenever and wherever he can. 
In 19 10 there were over five thousand practitioners 
in this country, which means that there were then five 
thousand special advertising agents scattered over this 
country, one important part of whose business it was 
to advertise and sell her books. That number must be 
constantly increasing. When it is realized that this 
book in the cheapest binding sells universally for 
three dollars, while its actual cost is not over fifty 
cents, one will see the enormous profit that has come 
to Mrs. Eddy and to her co-laborers through its sale. 

Mr. Peabody, in his book, reveals one other scheme 
that Mrs. Eddy worked upon her willing followers. 
It was to get out a new edition of this textbook every 
few months, and, in respect to some of these editions, 
at least, to request or require all Christian Scientists 
to purchase the new edition. This book has gone 
through approximately one hundred editions since its 
first publication in 1875, or during forty years. Many 
of these editions have had but slight changes in them, 
and it is hardly resonable to suppose that all of these 
editions with slight changes in them have been re- 
quired by the enormous sale of the book. In Febru- 
ary, 1908, she published this notice and sent it out to 
Christian Scientists everywhere: "I request Christian 
Scientists universally to read paragraph beginning at 
line thirty of page four hundred forty-two, in the 
edition of Science and Health which will be issued 



102 RELIGIOUS TEACHINGS 

February 29th." The paragraph to which she referred 
consisted of two lines, as follows: "Christian Scien- 
tists, be a law to yourselves, that mental malprac- 
tice can harm you neither when asleep nor when 
awake. ,, That was the only change in the whole book, 
yet she requested and urged Christian Scientists every- 
where to buy this new edition at five hundred per- 
cent profit to her, just so they could read this one 
paragraph of two lines. How much cheaper for them 
had she sent them each a personal letter, or a small 
tract. Since then another edition has appeared with 
only one line added, and has been urged upon the 
Christian Scientists. When it is realized that on each 
book she cleared two dollars and a half, one can see 
what a gold mine it was to her and to her followers 
to get out a new edition often and have the Christian 
Scientists generally buy it. 

This is the book that she claimed to be the direct 
revelation of God's truth to her, the book that con- 
tains the truth, the divine principle that heals the 
sick. Can the reader imagine with the wildest stretch 
of his imagination Jesus Christ or his disciples ever 
being so mercenary? Is this the spirit that they 
exhibited? Think how Jesus drove the money 
changers out of the temple because they were making 
God's house a house of merchandise and the worship 
of Jehovah an opportunity for monetary gain. Does 
this pretended healing that is so different in its 



OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 103 

method, so different in the kind of diseases that it 
heals, so different in the spirit and motive of its 
healers, appeal to the reader as in any sense a revival 
of early Christian healing ? 



PART III 

LOGICAL AND ACTUAL RESULTS OF THESE 
BELIEFS AND TEACHINGS ON LIFE 



CHAPTER I 

LEAD AWAY FROM TRUE RELIGIOUS WOR- 
SHIP 

The question forces itself upon serious minds, 
What is the effect now and what will be the future 
effect and outcome of such doctrines and of such 
teachings upon the lives of Christian Science people? 
Whenever Christian Science doctrines are attacked, 
Christian Scientists almost invariably reply, "Judge 
Christian Science by its fruits. That is what Jesus 
asked people to do concerning his doctrines and teach- 
ing, and that is all that Christian Science asks. Judge 
it by its fruits." Well, what are the fruits of Chris- 
tian Science doctrines and teachings and what will 
be their fruits more and more as the years come and 
go? 

Before entering into detail upon this subject, let 
it be remembered that there are hundreds and thou- 
sands of people who think they are Christian Scien- 
tists, but who, when it comes to the acceptance of or 
to the belief in these fundamental doctrines and teach- 
ings, are not Christian Scientists at all. They are too 
thoroughly Christian ever to be led away from the 
107 



108 RELIGIOUS TEACHINGS 

fundamentals of Christianity. Hence we need not 
expect to see the real effects of Christian Science 
doctrines and teachings in their lives. And yet time 
and constant association with those who do more or 
less clearly hold to these doctrines and teachings will 
little by little show its effects even in them. An- 
other thing that ought to be remembered is that the 
ripened fruit does not appear immediately upon the 
planting of the tree. It takes years after the seeds of 
the apple tree are sown before the ripened fruit ap- 
pears. So we need not expect soon to see the fully 
developed and ripened fruit of Christian Science doc- 
trines and teachings even in the lives of those who 
have accepted and who believe them. Yet sufficient 
time has elapsed to see some of the fruit, at least in 
its beginning, and to enable us to forecast what the 
ripened fruit will be. 

The first effect of Christian Science doctrines and 
teachings is, that they are leading the Christian Scien- 
tists, and will more and more lead them, away from 
all real religious worship. It will be granted without 
any serious question that the one supreme, predomi- 
nant note sounded by all Christian Scientists in their 
churches and outside, in their lectures and in their 
literature, is not the religious note, is not the note of 
divine worship, but the note of physical healing. The 
supreme emphasis is constantly placed on the healing 
side of their teachings. The whole system centers 



OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 109 

around the healing thought. Hence Christian Science 
is primarily a system of therapeutics and secondarily 
a system of religious belief and worship, In other 
words, the religious philosophy and teaching are given 
to prepare the way, to bolster up and support, the 
healing system; rather than the healing system given 
as an adjunct or proof of the religion. This in itself 
would naturally tend to lead away from all true wor- 
ship and would tend to make their church services 
more in the nature of therapeutic lectures, testimo- 
nials, and hospital displays than in the nature of real 
true spiritual worship. Any one who has attended the 
Christian Science services and has listened to the ser- 
mon-lectures or to the testimonials in their prayer 
meetings has undoubtedly noticed that this is true. 

Then the religious teachings themselves, even if 
they were made supreme and predominant, are of such 
a nature that they do not and cannot logically lead to 
true worship and devotion. If God is a principle to 
be understood, just as a principle in mathematics, 
just as a principle or law of nature, rather than a 
personal Being to be obeyed and loved and trusted 
and communed with; if he is an abstract principle, 
love or truth, rather than a Father who is interested 
in his children and wants to guide and help them and 
wants their love and devotion — then there is no ground 
for real worship of God. If Jesus Christ is not a 
personal Being, if he has no mind or soul or intelli- 



no RELIGIOUS TEACHINGS 

gence of his own, if he is only a reflection of a princi- 
ple, if he has no power, if he does not and cannot hear 
or answer prayer, if he does not forgive sins nor 
regenerate the heart, if he is not the source of spiritual 
life, if he is not now a living, personal Being who is 
interested in us and has power to help us, but is only 
a reflection of divine principle, truth, love, etc., — 
what is there to call forth real worship of or devotion 
to Christ? Surely one could not enthusiastically wor- 
ship the mere reflection of a principle. If the Holy 
Spirit is not a divine personal Being, one who takes the 
things of God and shows them unto us, but is simply 
this Christian Science teaching of Mrs. Eddy — can 
we worship that? If sin is a mere myth, an unreality 
that is to be forgotten, rather than an awful tragedy 
of life that caused Jesus Christ to suffer and die upon 
the cross for our redemption from it; if prayer is but 
the understanding of a principle, the intellectual grasp 
of truth, and has no thought of communion, no trust 
in the kindness or fatherhood of God, no coming to 
him, as a child comes to its earthly father, to tell him 
of our cares, our sorrows, our sins, and to ask for 
his forgiveness, his help, his guidance; if there are 
no times of real prayer in the church, if there is no 
family altar, no faith, in the sense of loving con- 
fiding trust, no hope of heaven hereafter, no devo- 
tional reading of the Bible but rather a joint reading 
of that with Mrs. Eddy's book as a guide to physical 



OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE in 

therapeutics — if all this is true, how can one expect 
it to lead to real worship and devotion? The fact is 
it does not and cannot, but rather leads the other way, 
away from all true and real worship. Let the reader 
visit the Christian Science churches anywhere and 
he will be impressed with the almost absolute lack of 
all true, spiritual worship or devotion in their services. 
Instead of worship, the emphasis is placed on physical 
healing and moral reformation through the under- 
standing of Mrs. Eddy's teachings and doctrine. 
There is little or no praise or adoration of God or of 
Jesus Christ or of the Holy Spirit, no thanksgiving 
to them for blessings bestowed. Almost all of the 
praise and almost all of the thanksgiving is to Mrs. 
Eddy and to Christian Science for what they have 
done. And this will necessarily become more and 
more true as the years go by and the real teachings 
of Christian Science are more and more accepted. 



ii2 RELIGIOUS TEACHINGS 

CHAPTER II 
LEAD TOWARD LIFE OF DISHONESTY 

A second effect of Christian Science teaching is 
that it leads to a life of, if not intentional, yet actual 
dishonesty and falsehood. The fundamental teach- 
ings of Mrs. Eddy cannot possibly be believed or lived 
in actual life, and hence because Christian Scientists 
must profess to believe and must teach what in actual 
life they cannot possibly believe or live, they are neces- 
sarily led to lives of greater or less dishonesty. This 
will undoubtedly be seen in the perusal of the follow- 
ing pages. 

The one supreme fundamental doctrine of Chris- 
tian Science upon which the whole system is founded 
is, God is all, literally and metaphysically all. Yet 
no Christian Scientist believes that in actual life. Is 
the Christian Scientist God? Is a tree God? Is a 
horse God? When a man gets on the horse's back 
and rides is he riding God? If the man is God and 
the horse is God, then is God riding himself? Is 
water God? If it is, then when a man drinks water, 
is God drinking God? Is a snake God? Is a harlot, 
a thief, a debased drunkard God? No one believes 
that or can believe it for an instant, and yet every 



OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 113 

Christian Scientist must profess to believe and must 
teach that God is literally and actually all. Now it 
is perfectly evident that if God is literally all, then 
he must be all of these things and there is no escape 
from this conclusion, or else these things do not exist, 
have no existence whatever of any kind. That is, 
there is no such thing as a tree or a horse or a snake 
or a man, there are no thieves or harlots or drunkards. 
These things have no existence whatever, no existence 
of any kind, not even temporary, shadowy, dreamy 
existence. For if they are even dreams or imaginings, 
then if God is literally all, he must be these dreams or 
imaginings. 

But no Christian Scientist anywhere can believe that 
these things have no existence whatever, that there 
is no such thing as a tree or a horse or a man. 

Again, Christian Science says that God is all and 
that God is spirit, mind, etc., and therefore, everything 
must be spirit, mind, etc., and there can be no matter, 
no material universe, no material body. What seems 
to be matter has no reality, is only a myth, the imagin- 
ings of the human mind. But no one believes that, 
not even a Christian Scientist. Why do Christian 
Scientists send their children to school to study geog- 
raphy or botany or zoology or astronomy if there is 
no material world, if there are no plants or flowers 
or animals or stars? Why get out of the way of a 
street-car or of a steam engine if there is no human 



ii 4 RELIGIOUS TEACHINGS 

body to be hurt and if there is no material street- 
car or engine to hit one — if it is only a human thought 
or imagination that is rolling along? Surely an 
imagination of the human mind, especially if that 
mind is not a reality and is only a myth, would not 
hurt one very much if it should hit him or run over 
him. Why eat material food or drink material water 
or wear material clothes if food and water and clothes 
have no reality? If drugs, being matter, have no 
reality and therefore no power to affect the body, how 
can meat and potatoes, which are surely as material 
as drugs? Why not do without material food as 
well as without material medicines? The fact is no 
one believes such things nor can believe them. The 
Christian Scientists say that all these things are but 
the creations, the imaginings, of the mortal mind, but 
they do not believe it. Has a chair no objective 
reality? Is it simply the product of my thought? If 
I thought it were a horse, would it be a horse ? Would 
it be a horse to you as well as to me? If I think it is 
a chair, and you think it is a desk, and another person 
thinks it is an apple, and another thinks it is a sack of 
flour, and another thinks it is a dog — then what is it? 
Is it all of these things? No, not any one, not even 
a Christian Scientist, would say that. But why not? 
Do all people have to think about it just the way I do? 
If so, why? Is it not because everyone knows that 
there is something there, something beside my thought, 



OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 115 

something entirely independent of my thought or your 
thought or all of our thoughts combined, something 
that makes all of us think alike about it, something 
that would be just the same whether I or you or any 
one were within a thousand miles of it or were think- 
ing about it at all ? 

Christian Scientists say that God is all, God is good, 
and therefore everything that is, is good, and there is 
no evil, no sin, no wrong in the world. That is Chris- 
tian Science doctrine and every Scientist is expected 
to believe it. But not one of them does believe it in 
actual life. Do Christian Scientists lock their doors 
at night? Why? Do they put their money in the 
bank? Why? If an enemy, for the sake of revenge, 
should burn their houses to the ground would they 
say that was good? If a human brute should attack 
a daughter of a Christian Scientist and ruin her life, 
would he smile and say that was good? Are the 
saloons, the brothels, the gambling dens good? Are 
theft and burglary and murder good? No, there is 
not a man or woman on earth that believes any such 
nonsense. Christian Scientists say these things have 
no reality; however, they know they have. They 
know these evils are all around us, they are as real 
as any of the acts of kindness or goodness in the 
world. The saloons and brothels are as actual and 
as real as are the churches or the school houses, and 
every Christian Scientist knows it. 



n6 RELIGIOUS TEACHINGS 

Christian Scientists say that God is all ; God is one, 
not two or many; God is mind, life, intelligence; 
therefore there is only one mind, one life, one intelli- 
gence in all the universe. But no Christian Scientist 
believes that. Had Jesus Christ no mind of his own ? 
Mrs. Eddy says no, his mind was only a reflection of 
mind. But few Christian Scientists believe that Christ 
had no mind, no intelligence. Have we human beings 
no minds of our own, have we no power to think, 
have we no life, no intelligence? If that were said 
of Christian Science people they would resent it. And 
yet that is what they profess to believe and what they 
must teach as consistent Christian Scientists. 

Christian Scientists say there is no sickness, no 
disease, no pain, no suffering, no death ; that these 
things have no reality whatever. And yet there is 
not one of them that believes it or can believe it in 
actual life. The Christian Science people are sick 
and have pain, they suffer and die, just like any of 
the rest of humanity, and every Christian Scientist 
knows it. They say there is no pain, yet they would 
not put their hands in the fire. Why? They say there 
is no sickness or disease, yet would they go into a 
house where there is small-pox or scarlet fever or 
diphtheria or cholera? Why not, if there is no dis- 
ease, if sickness has no reality? They say there is 
no death, but would they go up to the top of some high 
building and jump down? What do they do if they 



OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 117 

do not die? The author has officiated at the funerals 
of a number of Christian Scientists, and he could not 
see any difference between their "passing over" and 
the ordinary death. Would a house by any other 
name be any less a house? Changing the name does 
not change the thing. 

Christian Scientists must profess to believe these 
things and yet in reality, in actual life, they cannot 
possibly believe or live one of them. They may do 
for theories in the closet, but they cannot be lived 
in life. And the claiming to believe them, when in 
actuality they do not, is the life of dishonesty that 
they are compelled to live. And this dishonesty, even 
though unconscious and unintentional at first, will 
necessarily ultimately lead to conscious and intentional 
dishonesty. Christian Scientists are induced to say 
they have no pain when in actuality they are suffering 
with the intensest of pain. A woman told the writer 
that for several months while she was being treated 
by a Christian Scientist she claimed to have no pain, 
not to suffer in the least, and yet she admitted that 
many times when she said it, and said it with a forced 
smile, she was suffering so intensely that she could 
have screamed. When a visiting nurse came in one 
day she told her she was all right, was not suffering 
at all. The nurse could see from her face that she 
was in most intense pain. The nurse insisted on un- 
covering the diseased hip and when she did so found 



n8 RELIGIOUS TEACHINGS 

a place as large as one's hand, perfectly black, and 
gangrene had set in. The woman said, "All the time 
I lied about my suffering and said I was all right. I 
thought that was the thing to do." A few years ago 
a young woman, known to the writer, a leading Chris- 
tian Scientist in the city where she lived, became 
very sick. Although she claimed that she was not 
sick, she grew steadily worse. Some of the friends 
wanted to send for a physician, but she and her sister 
said, no. They had only a healer until a short time 
before her death when a physician was called. 
Toward the last she was in such agony that her 
screams could be heard a block away. She sunk her 
finger-nails into her flesh, bit through her lips, and 
died in that agony — professing until the very last that 
she was all right. Christian Scientists everywhere 
say they are not sick when they know they are, that 
they have no pain when they know they are suffering 
most severely. Christian Science mothers teach their 
children to be dishonest — to say to people who ask 
them, No I am not sick or, No I have not been sick, 
and yet the child knows all the time that he is, or has 
been sick, that he has had the measles or the croup 
or the whooping cough or some other ailment. Know- 
ing all this it makes the one who is not a Christian 
Scientist loath to accept the statement of any Chris- 
tian Scientist in regard to his having been healed. 
For if he will say that he is not sick when he knows 



OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 119 

he is, that he is not suffering pain when he is almost 
crazed with pain, may he not say that he was healed 
of a disease some time in the past, when in reality he 
was not, if the saying of it aids the cause along? 
Recently, the writer was at a Christian Science church 
in Omaha, Nebraska, at one of their prayer meetings. 
A man arose in the service and told that a few days 
before he had struck his head against a beam. He 
knew by the intense pain that it was a severe blow. 
He commenced demonstrating, thinking Christian 
Science thought, and instantly the pain left him. He 
had his wife put her hand on the place. She said, 
"Why, husband, there is a great dent in your head, a 
hole right in your forehead." Then he demonstrated 
again, and immediately the hole was gone. He ap- 
peared to be an intelligent man, but he did not seem 
to realize that everyone who knows anything about 
a bump knows that unless the skull were crushed there 
would be no dent, but rather a lump. He told it as 
absolute truth, yet such testimony as that would count 
for little with a jury or with any honest thinking 
person. 

The fact is that Christian Science doctrine compels 
its followers to live lives of greater or less self-decep- 
tion and dishonesty, to accept certain theories of life 
as true and to teach them, when not one of them can 
be believed or lived in actual life. And even unin- 
tentional dishonesty, if nevertheless recognized as dis- 



120 RELIGIOUS TEACHINGS 

honesty and persisted in when so recognized, will 
ultimately lead to intentional dishonesty. This is one 
of the most serious results of Christian Science teach- 
ing. What must be the final moral outcome in the 
lives of people who live this life of self-deception and 
dishonesty and teach it to their children? What will 
the ultimate result be upon society ? 



OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 



CHAPTER III 

TEND TO DESTROY SYMPATHETIC, COM- 
PASSIONATE FEELINGS TOWARD 
SUFFERING HUMANITY 

Christian Science doctrine and teaching tends to 
lead to the destruction of all of the gentle, more 
tender, sympathetic, compassionate feelings of the 
heart toward suffering and sorrowing humanity, and 
necessarily makes its followers more or less hard- 
hearted, cold, unsympathetic, unfeeling, and indif- 
ferent toward suffering and sorrow. This is neces- 
sarily so, because the denial of any reality to sin or 
suffering or death or poverty or calamity makes it 
impossible, consistently with such a belief, to show any 
such feelings toward that which they claim to be un- 
real and to be only error of the mortal mind. If none 
of these things really exist, if they are only the fake 
imaginings of a mythical mortal mind, there can be 
no occasion for charity, for compassion, for sym- 
pathy, or for sorrow. To give expression to any of 
these sentiments would be to admit the reality of these 
things and thus to admit the falsity of the Christian 
gcience theory, which of course, they must not do. 



122 RELIGIOUS TEACHINGS 

Hence, it has been a frequently observed effect among 
Christian Scientists, the drying up of the springs of 
the sweetest and tenderest and most Christlike of 
human feelings. For, if there was any one thing more 
than another that showed itself in the earthly life of 
Jesus Christ, it was his great compassion for the dis- 
tressed multitudes, his sympathy for the sick and un- 
fortunate, his tender-hearted sorrow for and with 
those that did sorrow, his heart-aching yearning after 
the lost sheep and the prodigal sons, his weeping over 
sinning Jerusalem, his dying agony on the cross for a 
lost and sinning world. 

How different from the spirit of Jesus Christ is 
the spirit of the Christian Science people all over 
this country who never go near the home, even of their 
closest friends, when death comes into that home, 
if they can possibly avoid it; and who never have any 
real words of sympathy or any tears of sorrow or any 
word or ray of comfort to offer in that hour when 
the heart so longs and yearns for sympathy and com- 
fort. How cold and hard-hearted seems the church 
that never opens its doors to a funeral ; that in order 
to uphold its theory that there is no death, refuses its 
altar to the precious body of its dead, and has no 
consolation to offer the living in that time of all times 
when people need the consolation and comfort that 
Jesus Christ so freely offered to his followers. Mrs. 
Eddy says, 386:31, "When our friends pass from 



OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 123 

our sight and we lament, the lamentation is needless 
and causeless." 

How different from the sympathetic, compassion- 
ate spirit of Jesus is the cold, indifferent, unsym- 
pathetic spirit of the Christian Science mother who 
hears the plaintive, sick cry of her suffering child and 
coldly says to it, "O, there is nothing the matter with 
you; you are not sick; that is only an error, a false 
belief. Run out and play and forget it." That might 
be all right for little, trifling ailments, but when a 
child is really sick, and seriously sick, then it seems 
inhuman. Mr. Peabody, to whom reference has been 
made, tells of a mother whose little boy was very sick. 
The child pleaded with her to get a doctor. She said 
to him, "Richard, you know you are not sick, you 
cannot be sick ; you know how to treat yourself when 
you have that false belief. Treat yourself, run away 
and play and do not bother me any more." A few 
days afterward he became so sick he could not stand 
or sit up any longer, and actually fell over on the 
floor amid his playthings and died, died absolutely 
neglected by his mother. Recently the writer learned 
of an incident almost exactly like it. A Christian 
Science mother, and her name could be given were it 
not too unkind, had a little boy who was sick with 
diphtheria. He tried to follow her instructions and 
think he was not sick. He got up from the couch 
where he was lying, tried to play the violin, told his 



124 RELIGIOUS TEACHINGS 

mother he was too sick, went and lay down across 
the foot of the bed and in a few minutes was dead. 
That mother coolly told a neighbor that that did not 
affect her belief in Christian Science one bit. It is 
possible for one to see how it might not affect her 
faith in the healing power of Christian Science, but it 
does seem as though it would affect one's faith in 
a religion that could so destroy the tender feelings 
of a mother toward her sick child. It seems a mystery 
how a religion or a philosophy that so destroys and 
dries up all the sweetest, tenderest, and most sym- 
pathetic feelings of the human heart can appeal so 
strongly to earnest, sincere people. 



OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 125 



CHAPTER IV 

TAKE AWAY THE BASIS FOR MORAL 
LIVING 

Christian Science in its fundamental teachings 
takes away the very basis for moral living, and even 
for moral decency itself, and throws open the flood 
gates for self-indulgence, dissipation, sin, and selfish- 
ness and even crime. Of course, Christian Scientists 
will deny this, and will point to the good lives of their 
people as proof that it is not true. But that does not 
affect the accuracy of this statement. It is granted 
that these teachings have not led the Christian Science 
people to openly sinful, dissipated, or criminal lives, 
and probably will not, at least for some time to come. 
But this is not because their fundamental teachings 
do not take away all basis for morality and give them 
full liberty to live as they please. It is due rather 
to three or four other things. First, the great mass 
of Christian Science people do not believe these funda- 
mental teachings and never will believe them. Even 
if they knew them, which most of them do not, God 
has placed down in the human consciousness an 
intuitive grasp of truth, a personal conscience, that 
will not let these foolish heads of ours go completely 
astray. Second, the morals and moral ideals of the 



126 RELIGIOUS TEACHINGS 

Christian Science people are not the morals or ideals 
that they have learned from the teachings of Mrs. 
Eddy or from the philosophy of Christian Science, 
but are the morals and ideals that they have learned 
and have had instilled into them through years of 
teaching and training in Christian homes, in Sunday 
Schools, and in Christian churches — Methodist, Bap- 
tist, Presbyterian, Congregational, Catholic, Lutheran, 
Episcopal, etc. — from their earliest childhood, and 
these ideals and habits do not change in a moment. 
People do not put off the ideals and habits of a life- 
time and take on new ones as they change a suit of 
clothes; so we need not expect to see any marked 
change either in ideals or habits in the near future. 
It was a century after the teachings of Voltaire and 
his school before France began to see and to reap the 
awful results of that infidel teaching in the moral lives 
of her people. And it may be a century or even several 
centuries before we will see the real or extreme re- 
sults of this Christian Science teaching and doctrine. 
Third, we must remember that public sentiment and 
public ideals of morality and decency in all Christian 
countries, and the shrinking from public ostracism 
because of violation of these ideals, together with the 
laws of human society and their penalties, keep and 
will always keep people of any theoretic belief from 
carrying out and living the logical outcome of those 
beliefs, if that logical outcome is a flagrant violation 



OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 127 

of those laws and customs and ideals. And then, 
fourth, everyone knows that Christian Science grows 
by proselyting from the Christian churches. At least 
nine-tenths of all the people in the Christian Science 
churches have been won from the orthodox Christian 
churches. If the Christian Scientists, whatever their 
fundamental beliefs may be, did not live clean, up- 
right, decent lives, people of the Christian churches 
would not listen to their teaching or to their solicita- 
tions for a moment. All of these things combined 
exercise, and will continue to exercise, a restraining 
influence upon the lives of the followers of Mrs. Eddy 
and will keep them from any rapid outward moral 
deterioration. 

But that does not vitiate the fact that the funda- 
mental teachings and philosophy of Christian Science 
tear down all barriers and give full rein for people 
to do and live as their selfish inclination and impulses 
lead. Two things are necessary to keep humanity 
from degenerating morally and to lead it to the highest 
moral living; one is a sufficient motive for right liv- 
ing and the other is a sufficient deterrent from wrong 
and immoral living. Christian Science teachings and 
doctrines, that is, its fundamental teachings and doc- 
trines, furnish neither of these. What reward does 
Christian Science offer in this world or in the next; 
what advantage will there be, now or hereafter, to the 
one who tries and struggles to live up to his moral 



128 RELIGIOUS TEACHINGS 

ideal, to the moral standard of the Bible ; what reward 
to the one who unselfishly sacrifices and gives of his 
self and of his means to help others and to make the 
world better? Absolutely none. What will be the 
penalty of suffering or disadvantage in this world or 
in the next to the one who never strives or struggles 
for self -betterment, who just lets loose and follows the 
bent of his animal appetites and passions, who self- 
ishly and even dishonestly gets everything that he 
can by fair or by foul means, who does not stop even 
at crime to gain what he desires or wishes? Abso- 
lutely not any. This seems like an awful statement 
to make, but it is undoubtedly true according to the 
fundamentals of Christian Science teaching. 

First, Mrs. Eddy teaches over and over again that 
there is no such thing as wickedness or sin or crime, 
that they have no reality at all. 1 All that is, is good, 
all that has any reality, all that is fact, is good — 
all the rest is unreal and non-existent. Second, she 
teaches that the only man that has any existence, any 
reality whatever, is the one who is God's reflection, 
and that he always existed and always will exist, that 
he is perfect morally as God is perfect, always was 
perfect and always will be perfect. He never has 
sinned, he does not sin, and he never will sin. In 
fact, he cannot sin and God cannot give him power 
to sin. 2 Now he is the only man that has any existence 

» Pp. 39,40. » Pp. 32.33. 



OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 129 

whatever. The other man, the mortal man, may sin, 
dissipate, and commit crime, but he has no real exist- 
ence. He is only a myth, the production of the mortal 
mind, and that mortal mind has no real existence. 1 He 
does not and cannot become the real man, for the real 
man has always existed, and he, the mortal man, is 
only the product of mortal mind, which mortal mind 
has no real existence, and is only a myth. There is 
absolutely no connection between this mortal man 
and the real man, never was and never will be. There- 
fore this mortal man may sin, get drunk, or commit 
crime, but what is the difference? He is only a myth 
and these things that he seems to do are only dreams 
and have no reality. There is no guilt, no sin, no 
lost soul, no punishment, no suffering, no hereafter, 
no final judgment, for there is nothing that can sin 
or suffer or be judged. Mrs. Eddy says, "It is 
material sense, not soul, that sins and it will be found 
that it is the sense of sin which is lost and not a 
sinning soul." It would be hard, indeed, to see how 
a non-existing myth could be guilty of sin or could 
be judged or could suffer or be punished. What in- 
ducement is held out to this mortal myth to try to be 
good or to do good? There is no reward here, this 
mortal myth has no existence hereafter. There is 
no heaven even for good myths, and there is no hope 
or promise that this mortal myth can ever change into 



130 RELIGIOUS TEACHINGS 

the real man. If the mortal man wants to sin, there- 
fore, or to be immoral or to dissipate or to commit 
crime, what is to prevent him? Just let him realize 
that it is the mortal mind that is doing these things, 
that "The mortal mind in every case is the criminal," 
and that the mortal mind has no existence. The sin 
that one seems to commit is only illusion. If, there- 
fore, one gets any pleasure out of indulging the illu- 
sion ; if one wants to drink or gamble or be a libertine 
or anything else, he is free to do so. A myth that 
gets drunk or commits crime is just as good as any 
other kind of myth. A mythical mortal man may be 
as good as a Saint John, but what of it, what good 
will it do? He will vanish away just as any other 
mortal, any other non-existing myth. What is to deter 
John Jones or Andrew Smith from committing any 
sin or crime? It is not the real John Jones or Andrew 
Smith that does it; he cannot sin; God cannot even 
give him the power to sin. It is the mortal John Jones 
or Andrew Smith that does the sinning and he has no 
real existence. What is to hinder a man's going on the 
witness stand and perjuring himself, and then if he is 
found out, defending himself by saying that it was not 
his real self that swore falsely, but his mortal self? 
What, so far as Christian Science teaching is con- 
cerned, is to deter a man from any sin or crime ? All 
that he needs to do is just to say that it was not he 
himself that did it, it was the mortal man. 



OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 131 

No doubt the above conclusions may seem like false 
statements of Christian Science teaching, like trumped 
up fictions of the author's imagination. But they are 
not. They are the actual teachings of Christian 
Science or the direct logical outcome of those teach- 
ings. The author of this book asked a prominent 
Christian Scientist, a graduate of college, one who 
wears a Phi Beta Kappa pin, one who has practiced 
law before every court in the land up to the supreme 
bench, and one who has read Mrs. Eddy's book more 
than a score of times and who knows her teachings 
accurately — the author asked her if he should be- 
come angry at her and should shoot her down in cold 
blood and should never repent of his crime but should 
go on living a life of crime and dissipation, if there 
would be any punishment for him in the next world. 
She answered, "No, none whatever." The author 
said, "If a person lives the most dissipated, immoral, 
and cruel life — is a gambler, a thief, an adulterer, a 
blasphemer, and continues so until the end of his 
earthly life, will there be no punishment whatever 
for him? Will he not have to suffer at all for his 
evil life?" She answered, "No, not at all. It is only 
the mortal man that sins, and he has no existence, 
now nor hereafter, and hence cannot suffer." The 
author asked, "Can the mortal man become the real 
man either in this life or in the next ?" She answered, 
"No." The author then said, "What advantage can 



132 RELIGIOUS TEACHINGS 

it be for the mortal man to try to live right, so far as 
the next world is concerned ?" She said, "None what- 
ever/' He said, "What then will deter a person from 
living a reckless life of sin ?" She answered, "O he will 
find there is no fun in it, and he will not want to do it." 

Another proof that the author has not misrepre- 
sented Christian Science teaching in these conclusions 
is -shown in the statement of one of the leading Chris- 
tian Science officers of Boston. A few years ago, when 
Mrs. Stetson, of New York city, was being severely 
criticized for her attempted murder, by absent treat- 
ment, of one of the Boston Scientists (Mr. Archibald 
McClellan), this leading official said in her defense, 
It was not the real Mrs. Stetson who attempted the 
murder, but the mortal Mrs. Stetson; the real Mrs. 
Stetson could not do anything wrong. 

What doctrine, born in hell, conjured up by the 
minds of Satan and all his crafty host, could be more 
destructive of the very foundations of that common 
morality and decency upon which the whole fabric 
of society rests? What conception or philosophy or 
ism could be devised that would more widely throw 
open the gates to all self-indulgence and dissipation and 
crime ? Surely there is none. Let us be thankful that 
not many even of the Christian Science people believe 
these fundamental doctrines, and may we sincerely 
hope that the time will never come when they will. 
Woe to human society if that day should ever come. 



OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 133 

CHAPTER M 
LESSEN THE SACREDNESS OF HOME 

Christian Science teaching strikes at the very heart 
of the most sacred institution in life — the home. To 
all noble, high-minded, pure souls the marriage rela- 
tion is the sweetest, the purest, the holiest, the most 
sacred relation in all our lives; and fatherhood and 
motherhood, the relation of parent to child, is but little 
less than divine. What is sweeter, purer, more like 
an angel than a sweet, innocent, pure baby? Yet 
Mrs. Eddy regarded the marriage relation as sensuous 
and impure. In her dedication address, at the dedi- 
cation of the "Mother Church" in Boston in 1906, 
she spoke very emphatically against the marriage rela- 
tion and characterized marriage as "synonymous with 
legalized lust." These were her own words. In her 
book she calls children "sensual and mortal beliefs." 
Mr. Peabody in his book says there has never been 
a marriage in any Christian Science church, that there 
is no Christian Science marriage ceremony, and there 
are no Christian Science officials authorized to per- 
form marriage. 

It is true that Mrs. Eddy says some very beautiful 
things and gives some splendid injunctions concern- 



i 3 4 RELIGIOUS TEACHINGS 

ing the marriage relation in her chapter on marriage. 
But the reader will notice how she starts her chapter 
by giving the words of Jesus to John at his baptism, 
"Suffer it to be so now, ..." and then says, "This 
was Jesus' concession to material methods." So she, 
in this chapter, makes concessions to the legal and 
moral provisions of government and of society for 
generations among mankind, "until the spiritual crea- 
tion is . . . apprehended and understood." But the 
statements in this chapter do not represent her real 
underlying feelings, or her fundamental teachings, 
and are only concessions to human law and human 
society. In one of her writings she says, "These 
words of Matthew" (however, they were those of 
Paul) "have special application to Christian Science, 
namely, 'It is not good to marry.' " In Miscellanies, 
p. 297, Mrs. Eddy says, "I hereby state in unmis- 
takable language the following statute in the morale 
of Christian Science : A man or woman having volun- 
tarily entered into wedlock and accepted the claims 
of the marriage covenant is held in Christian Science 
as morally bound to fulfill all the claims growing out 
of this contract, unless such claims are relinquished 
by mutual consent of both parties or this contract is 
legally dissolved." And again, she writes, "Is mar- 
riage nearer right than celibacy? Human knowledge 
inculcates that it is, while Science indicates that it is 
not." A large part of this chapter on marriage was 



OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 135 

not in her earlier "revelations from God," and was 
only put in after the storm of protest that arose within 
and without her church because of the above state- 
ments and others like them. 

To show the intense feeling that was aroused in 
her church over these and like statements, the fol- 
lowing quotation from an address by George W. 
Louttit, former First Reader of First Church of 
Christ, Scientist, of Fort Wayne, Indiana, is given. 
He says : "In 1906, Mrs. Eddy in her message to the 
mother church at Boston characterized marriage as 
'legalized lust/ which statement together with the 
attitude of Christian Science leaders, caused twenty- 
seven members to withdraw from the Second Church 
of Christ, Scientist, Cleveland, Ohio, among which 
number was Mr. Arthur G. Frisbie, formerly its First 
Reader and a member of the Christian Science publish- 
ing committee. All over the country there were like 
withdrawals. In Fort Wayne, Indiana, more than one 
half of the original members have withdrawn and 
are no longer Christian Scientists. In Buffalo, Pitts- 
burgh, Oakland, and many other cities the same loss 
has occurred to a greater or less extent among the 
original members who were not leaders or healers. 
As the latter class are usually people whose livings 
are dependent on the system, they are more reluctant 
to break away, yet there are many instances where 
they do so." 



136 RELIGIOUS TEACHINGS 

"All of these people knew of Mrs. Eddy's numerous 
marriages and divorce, and also knew that in her 
writings she had made no mention of the divine side 
of marriage or of its higher spiritual companionship 
or of the sacredness of the home life. But these acts 
and omissions they had forgiven, thinking that she 
had repented of her follies and wished them buried 
and forgotten. But when she, in the maturity of life, 
characterized marriage as legalized lust, it was evi- 
dent to them that she was the same she always had 
been: that Mrs. Eddy and Mrs. Patterson were still 
the same person, with the same ideas, inclinations, and 
sinful thoughts, and unworthy to be a leader. So they 
denounced her and her system." 

It was this storm of protest that caused her to 
modify and change her teachings, and to incorporate 
in this chapter many of the beautiful things that are 
now in it about marriage. Yet these earlier state- 
ments show her real feelings. If she believed in 
marriage why did she provide no marriage ceremony 
for the Christian Science church ? Why do they have 
no marriages celebrated in their churches? And why 
are there no officials of the church authorized to per- 
form marriage? While Mrs. Eddy in her chapter on 
marriage makes concessions to human society, and 
while she, to appease public opinion, says some very 
beautiful things about the marriage relation; yet the 
fact is that she did look upon marriage as "synony- 



OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 137 

mous with legalized lust" and looked upon children as 
"sensual mortal beliefs." And it is not to be wondered 
at when you know the life she lived. She was three 
times married and once divorced on the ground of 
desertion, her divorced husband finding it impossible 
to live with her on account of her disagreeable dis- 
position. After the death of her last husband she 
would not try marriage any more, but for years a 
man, Calvin A. Frye, lived with her in the intimacy 
of her home without a marriage ceremony, although, 
as some of her neighbors said, it would have been 
better for her reputation for chastity if they had been 
married. She was so unnatural a mother and cared 
so little for her only child that to get rid of him and 
not to be bothered by him she gave him over to an 
ignorant servant woman to rear, and allowed him to 
be brought up in such ignorance that to his dying 
day, then over seventy, he could not read or write. 
A wild beast mother will protect and care for her 
young even to the death. It is only a harlot that will 
turn her back upon her offspring. No wonder such 
a woman thought of marriage as "synonymous with 
legalized lust" and thought of children as "sensual 
mortal beliefs." Jesus said, "Out of the abundance 
of the heart the mouth speaketh." 

What would be the result of such teachings and 
conceptions in regard to marriage if carried out in 
life? If marriage is nothing but legalized lust, and if 



138 RELIGIOUS TEACHINGS 

children born in wedlock are but sensuous mortal be- 
liefs, then the man and woman, who live lives of open 
immorality and who have children born out of wed- 
lock, are no more sinful, no more sensual, than the 
purest father and mother who live in the sacred rela- 
tion of husband and wife and have children born to 
them; then the Bible and human law which sanction 
marriage, are only placing a cloak of respectability on 
sensual and lustful lives, while so far as lust and 
sin in the heart are concerned one's married daughter 
is just as sensual as any harlot, and one's married son 
just as corrupt as any libertine. If such a doctrine 
as that should be accepted as true what but the penal- 
ties of human law would deter people from living lives 
of common immorality? By Mrs. Eddy's teaching 
the only pure life is the life of celibacy, the life that 
would lead to race suicide. 

Jesus Christ considered the marriage relation so 
sacred and so binding that he recognized but one 
cause for divorce, adultery, and he said that anyone 
who dissolved the marriage bond for any other rea- 
son was guilty of adultery. Every Christian church 
in the world places its ban upon divorce, and many 
of them absolutely forbid their ministers to marry 
divorced persons. But Mrs. Eddy held the marriage 
bond so loosely that she herself secured legal divorce 
from one of her husbands on the ground of deser- 
tion; and she told her followers that in Christian 



OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 139 

Science the marriage bond was to hold unless "such 
claims are relinquished by mutual consent of both 
parties, or this contract is legally dissolved." So that 
if Christian Scientists desire to get legal divorce for 
any cause, or if they desire to marry and live to- 
gether for a few months and then by mutual consent 
agree to separate and each marry some one else for 
a while until he gets tired of that new union, and then 
the parties to this new union agree to separate and 
try a third union, and so on indefinitely, they have the 
specific permission if not the sanction of Mrs. Eddy 
and Christian Science for it. 

Mr. George W. Louttit, in the address referred to 
before, says: "Mrs. Eddy's church, because of her 
view upon marriage and divorce, is a Mecca for 
divorcees, who with those Scientists who do not want 
and who do not have children, are Mrs. Eddy's most 
loyal supporters. In one Christian Science church 
over twenty-five per cent of its members have been 
divorced, and in some cases on grounds that should 
have shamed them. Some of these persons, because 
of these acts, have been driven out of other churches, 
have drifted around for a time, and finally with the 
spouse who had furnished the ground upon which 
the first spouse was granted a decree, have found a 
home in the Christian Science church. To-day these 
people are its leaders and healers. Unfortunately 
there are no statistics covering this phase of Christian 



i 4 o RELIGIOUS TEACHINGS 

Science membership, but if there were, the eyes of the 
world certainly would be opened." 

"Mrs. Eddy also teaches that the foetus is nothing 
but matter, without life, without intelligence — from 
which statement the reader can draw his own con- 
clusions as to why there are so few children in Chris- 
tian Science homes." Such a theory gives full license 
to the criminal practice of abortion. Remember that 
the above statements are from a man who was at one 
time a First Reader of a prominent Christian Science 
church, and that these statements were made in print 
in May, 1909, while Mrs. Eddy was still living. 

Is not such a conception of the marriage relation 
as this of Mrs. Eddy worse even than the polygamous 
conceptions and teachings of Mormonism? 



OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 141 



CHAPTER VI 

IF REALLY BELIEVED, WOULD DESTROY 

INTEREST IN NATURE AND DESIRE 

FOR KNOWLEDGE 

Christian Science teaching and philosophy, if it 
were believed and practiced in life, would take away 
all the pleasure, all the joy, all the interest that comes 
from a study and appreciation of nature ; and in fact, 
it would take away all desire for the acquiring of any 
knowledge that has to do with the physical universe. 

The Bible says that "In the beginning God created 
the heaven and the earth," that God made man a 
physical body and then breathed into that body the 
breath of life and that thus man became a living soul, 
the creation of God himself. Christian Science says 
that "This so-called man and material universe . . . 
was never made by spirit, God, and is only of mortal 
mind creation, which mortal mind itself is false." 1 
The Bible says that "The heavens declare the glory 
of God, and the firmament showeth his handiwork;" 
that "the heavens are the work of his fingers, and the 
moon and the stars he has ordained." But Chris- 
tian Science says that God had nothing whatever to 
do with the creation of any of these things, that they 



142 RELIGIOUS TEACHINGS 

are all of mortal mind creation. Mrs. Eddy says, 
"The physical universe expresses but the conscious 
and unconscious thoughts of mortals." 1 Jesus told his 
disciples that God makes his sun to shine upon the 
evil and upon the good, that he sends the rain, that 
he arrays the lilies in all their beauty, that he clothes 
the grass and feeds the ravens and that not even a 
sparrow can fall to the earth without his notice. 
Christian Science says that neither God nor Jesus 
Christ had in the beginning nor has to-day anything 
whatever to do with any of these material things, that 
they are all the imaginings of the mortal mind and 
have no existence outside of our mortal minds. 2 To 
the ordinary Christian it would be a dire calamity 
to have to think that God had nothing to do with the 
creation of this world; that he never created the sun 
or the moon or the stars; that he had nothing to do 
with the formation of the hills and the mountains and 
the rocks and the seas; that his hand had nothing to 
do with the formation of the flowers or the trees or 
the birds or the sky. The writer is a lover of nature, 
but nature would lose its charm to him if he did not 
see the hand of God, his Father, in every spear of 
grass, in every flower, and in every tree, and rock, 
and star. What would it mean if, when we walk out 
into the parks or out into the fields or out into the 
woods or out under the open sky at night, we had to 

»P. 36. *,Pp. 35, 36, 38. 



OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 143 

think every time we looked at a flower or a rock or a 
beautiful landscape or a twinkling star that our God 
had had nothing at all to do with these things, that 
none of them really exist or have any objective reality, 
but that they are only the imaginings, the fancies, of 
our own mortal minds, and that even the minds which 
imagine them are not real but only myths? How 
much of the beauty and the interest and the sacred- 
ness of nature would be gone if out of it were taken 
all thought that an intelligent, all wise, loving heav- 
enly Father had made it and had made it for us to 
see and appreciate and enjoy? 

If there is no objective reality whatever to any of 
these material things, if there is no objective physical 
universe, if matter and all material substances have 
no reality, if what we thought were forces and laws 
of the world do not really exist, and all of these things 
are only the mythical dreams of our own mythical 
mortal minds, then all our schools and all our educa- 
tion that has to do with the physical universe are of 
no avail. If there are no stars or planets or sun up 
yonder in the sky; if there are no forces, working 
according to exact mathematical laws, controlling the 
movements of these bodies ; if there are no such things 
as material elements; if all of these apparent things 
have no objective reality at all and are but the imagin- 
ings of our own mortal minds; then what is the use 
of wasting our time in studying astronomy? What 



144 RELIGIOUS TEACHINGS 

is the use of trying to find out the number of the 
stars when there are no stars? What is the use of 
trying to determine the distances or the orbits or the 
material elements of which these heavenly bodies are 
composed, when in reality there are no such heavenly 
bodies in existence? 

What is the use of spending years in the study 
of chemistry, trying to find out the nature of the 
material elements of the earth and the laws and forces 
that govern them, if in reality these material elements 
do not exist, have no objective reality whatever, and 
if there are no forces or laws governing them? The 
chemist speaks of decomposing water into its com- 
ponent elements, hydrogen and oxygen, but how 
foolish if there is no such thing as water and if there 
are no such elements as hydrogen and oxygen ? Why 
study physics if there are no physical laws or physical 
forces or physical matter? Why study physiology or 
biology if our bodies have no reality, if there are no 
material bones or muscles or corpuscles or brain cells ? 
Why study embryology if there are no such things 
as embryos or germs or microbes? Why study geog- 
raphy if there is no physical earth; if what seem to 
be mountains and rivers and lakes and oceans and 
plains are but the fleeting thoughts of mortal minds? 
Why study botany or zoology or geology if plants and 
animals and rocks have no objective existence and are 
but the vanishing thoughts of mythical mortal minds ? 



OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 145 

Such a theory takes away absolutely all basis for 
science or for scientific knowledge. As was shown 
earlier in this book Christian Science clearly states 
that "there is no physical science." It says, that 
"material substances or mundane formations, astro- 
nomical calculations, and all of the paraphernalia of 
speculative theories based on the hypothesis of 
material law" have no foundation whatever; that 
"what are termed natural science and material laws 
are but the objective states of mortal mind;" that 
there are in reality no such things as animals, but 
that "mortal mind . . . confers animal names and 
natures on its own misconceptions," that the "physical 
universe merely expresses the conscious or uncon- 
scious thoughts of mortals;" that "Matter seems to 
be, but is not;" that "what is termed matter is but 
the subjective state of what is termed mortal mind;" 
and that all of us who "support the sense testimony 
of a material earth and a stellar universe and a 
physical creation are in gross and blinded ignorance." 1 
So what is the use to study about it, to spend so much 
time in trying to learn about that which has no reality 
and is only the dream of non-existing mythical mortal 
minds ? Fully nine-tenths of all that is taught in our 
public schools and colleges and universities has to 
do with this material universe. If this whole material 
universe, including man, has no existence, no objec- 

! >Pp.35, 38. 



146 RELIGIOUS TEACHINGS 

tive reality whatever and is only the dream of mortal 
mind, then we might as well spend our time in telling 
and studying each other's night dreams. If Christian 
Science teaching in regard to the world and its nature 
should become universally accepted it would banish 
all of our schools, close the doors of all our colleges 
and universities, and would hurl humanity backward 
a thousand years into the grossest ignorance of the 
dark ages; and it would leave us to wander about 
as insane and irresponsible dreamers, mortal minds, 
mythical in their existence, dreaming and imagining 
all sorts of inane things, giving names and possibly 
a temporary seeming existence to their mythical 
imaginings. Mrs. Eddy says, 250:6, "Mortal exist- 
ence is a dream." 249 : 22, "Mortals are Adam 
dreamers. The mortal night dream is sometimes 
nearer the fact of being than are the thoughts of 
mortals when awake." 250 : 22, "Now I ask, Is there 
any more reality in the waking dream of mortal exist- 
ence than in the sleeping dream? There cannot be." 
Such a theory makes a farce of all education, a farce 
of all learning, a farce of all our schools, and it puts 
a premium on the dumbest and most superstitious 
ignorance. 

To avoid this dilemma, along practical and scientific 
lines, into which their whole teaching plunges them, 
the modern Christian Scientists are saying that what 
they mean by things being unreal is that they are 



OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 147 

not eternal. That is, they say that matter, the physical 
universe, the things we see about us, our bodies and 
our minds, etc., are not eternal in their nature, and 
have only a temporary existence. Some of them at 
least admit such temporary existence to these things. 
But if Christian Scientists admit that these things 
have a real, actual, bona fide existence for even the 
briefest period of time, that one admission, if they 
will stick to it logically, will overthrow the whole 
Christian Science system of philosophy, of religion, 
and of healing. Christian Science is founded upon the 
statement that God is all, literally, metaphysically, 
and absolutely all. Its whole system is a matter of 
logical deduction from this one statement taken liter- 
ally. But if matter, the human body, the physical uni- 
verse, or any of the objects about us have even a 
temporary existence, then while they exist either they 
must be God, which would be pantheism pure and 
simple and which theory the Christian Scientists deny, 
or else for that temporary time God is not all. But 
if they admit that there is a single second of time 
when God is not literally and actually all, then they 
might as well admit that there are two seconds or a 
thousand seconds or a millennium when God is not all. 
And if God is not literally all for one second or for 
one year or for one century, then for that period of 
time at least, it is granted that things do exist which 
are not God. And if they are not God, Spirit, then 



148 RELIGIOUS TEACHINGS 

they may be matter. If they are not God, good, then 
they may be evil. And if Christian Scientists admit 
that these material and evil things, which are not 
God, have a real existence for even a brief temporary 
time, they might as well admit, so far as logic is con- 
cerned, that they have a longer period of real exist- 
ence, which admission would bring them back to the 
position that is almost universally held, and would 
be giving up their whole system. 

No one in these days claims that matter and the 
physical universe is eternal, but we do claim that, 
whatever may be its objective nature, it has a real 
and actual existence and that it may exist for years 
and centuries to come. None of the Christian churches 
teach that these physical bodies are eternal. We ex- 
pect to die, that is, to come to the time when the soul 
and body will be separated, and when the body will 
go back to dust, to the physical elements from which 
it came. No one believes that sickness is eternal. We 
believe that it is only a temporary experience, but 
that while it lasts it is real. If Christian Scientists 
admit that matter and disease have even a temporary 
existence, and that while they exist they are real and 
genuine, then there is no logical reason why material 
drugs may not affect the disease of a material body 
during that period while they both exist. But such an 
admission would overthrow the whole Christian 
Science system. 



OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 149 

In order to be at all consistent they are forced to 
say, as Mrs. Eddy does say, that God is literally all, — 
now, at this instant, and at every instant in all eternity. 
And they are forced to say with Mrs. Eddy that every- 
thing that is not God has no existence whatever, not 
even a temporary shadowy existence for even the 
shortest period of time, and hence, to deny all exist- 
ence, even temporary existence, to all the physical 
universe and to the mortal man himself. 

Strange as it may seem one important claim of the 
Christian Scientists is that their system of thought 
and their religion is so intellectual, so scientific, so in 
harmony with the most advanced and progressive 
ideas. But can a theory or system of thought that 
denies all basis for scientific knowledge be very scien- 
tific? Can a theory that denies all intelligence, all 
mentality to man be very intellectual ? Can a theory 
which says that all the flowers and trees and rocks 
and hills and oceans and mountains and stars, that all 
the laws and forces of nature — gravity, heat, light, 
electricity — have no objective reality whatever and are 
only the imaginings of mythical, mortal minds — can 
such a theory be very scientific or very philosophic? 
Can a system of thought which makes nine-tenths of 
all that is taught in the schools and colleges and uni- 
versities and libraries of the world absolutely false 
and without any foundation whatever, be very in- 
telligent? What would be thought of the intellectual 



ISO RELIGIOUS TEACHINGS 

or scientific standing of a college or university that 
would teach its students to ignore the laws of hygiene 
and even the laws of common cleanliness? Christian 
Science in its text book says, 382 : 3, "He who is 
ignorant of what is termed hygienic law is more recep- 
tive of spiritual power." 382 : 8, "Constant bathing 
and rubbing (of an infant) ... to remove un- 
healthy exhalations from the cuticle receive a useful 
rebuke from Jesus' precept, 'Take no thought . . . 
for the body.' " 383 : 7, "The Christian Scientist takes 
the best care of his body when he leaves it out of his 
thought," or in other words, when he just lets it alone 
in its filth and never washes or bathes at all. Such 
a theory may be very "progressive," but it is far 
from scientific. What would be thought of the philo- 
sophic standing of a university that would teach its 
students that, 508: 14, Gender is a quality or charac- 
teristic of mind and not of matter, that women have 
been made pregnant just by thinking it; that, 413: 31, 
a child may be made to have worms by telling him 
that he has ; that, 489 : 3, a person with a limb gone 
can think another real limb in its place, and that, 
161 : 3, it is even possible for one to burn himself up 
by spontaneous combustion simply by thinking it? 
What chemist in any school in the land would accept 
as scientific Mrs. Eddy's definition of chemicalization, 
401 : 16, "What I term chemicalization is the upheaval 
produced when immortal Truth is destroying erro- 



OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 151 

neous mortal belief. Mental chemicalization brings sin 
and sickness to the surface"? How scientific would 
a school be considered that would accept as facts, 
without investigation or proof, statements such as the 
following from Mrs. Eddy: 556:31, "It is related 
that a father plunged his infant babe, only a few 
hours old, into the water for several minutes, and 
repeated this operation daily, until the child could 
remain under water twenty minutes, moving and play- 
ing without harm, like a fish"? 

It has been stated by good authority that there is 
not a college or university of any standing in the 
world that has a Christian Scientist as a professor in 
it. Men and women from every other church, men 
and women without any church relation, and even men 
and women who are skeptics and disbelievers in all 
religion, are employed as professors; but no college 
or university anywhere in the whole civilized world 
would disgrace itself and lower its intellectual stand- 
ing by having it known that a Christian Scientist was 
on its staff of professors or instructors, if that Chris- 
tian~ Scientist were attempting to teach his Christian 
Science theories. It is true there are some teachers 
in our public schools and high schools, and it is even 
possible that there may be some here or there in our 
colleges, who are Christian Scientists; but not one 
of them would dare undertake to teach the Christian 
Science theories concerning matter, the material uni- 



1 52 RELIGIOUS TEACHINGS 

verse, man, or in fact, concerning any subject taught 
in the schools. If he should try it in any public school 
or high school or college in the country, inside of 
forty-eight hours after the fact became known, he 
would be asked to resign. The only way a Christian 
Scientist could hold a position in any school in this 
country or in any civilized country of the world, 
would be that in no particular would he teach Chris- 
tian Science theories upon any scientific or philo- 
sophic subject, or in fact, upon any subject that has 
to do with human knowledge. 

Christian Scientists may say that neither would 
Roman Catholics nor Jews nor Methodists be per- 
mitted to teach their Roman Catholic doctrine or their 
Jewish doctrine or their Methodist doctrine in the 
schools. But that is not the question. It is not a ques- 
tion of Christian Scientists teaching their religious 
theories in the schools, it is a question of the teach- 
ing of their intellectual theories. If they never taught 
their religious beliefs at all, if they never mentioned 
them either in public teaching or in private, but under- 
took to teach simply their intellectual theories they 
would not be tolerated in any school or college or uni- 
versity in the land. It is their intellectual theories that 
are so inane, so nonsensical, and so absurd that no 
self-respecting school anywhere would tolerate for an 
instant the teaching of them. 



OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 153 



CHAPTER VII 

TEND TOWARD WORST FORM OF WITCH- 
CRAFT 

When Christian Science doctrine and teaching is 
accepted, it tends to lead to the worst, the lowest, the 
most insane form of witchcraft that was ever con- 
ceived by the mind of man or of demons. Most of 
the facts in this chapter are taken from Mr. Frederick 
W. Peabody's book, "The Religio-Medical Masquer- 
ade," and the pages cited refer to this book. Let 
it be remembered that Mr. Peabody is a prominent 
lawyer in the city of Boston, that these statements 
were all made while Mrs. Eddy was living, and that 
not one of them has ever been disproved. 

Mrs. Eddy, on p. 123 of the first edition of her 
Science and Health, says, "In coming years the per- 
son or mind that hates his neighbor will have no need 
to traverse his fields to destroy his flocks and herds, 
and spoil his vines; or to enter his house to despoil 
his household; for the evil mind will do this through 
mesmerism." On p. 178 of the thirteenth edition of 
her book she says, "A mental malpractice can impair 
the health of those ignorant of the cause and how to 



154 RELIGIOUS TEACHINGS 

treat it." On p. 515 of the 36th edition, she says, 
"This malicious animal power seeks to kill his fel- 
low mortals,, morally and physically, and then to 
charge the innocent with crime." (172) In a letter 
to one of her students she wrote, "The mental mal- 
practioners or mesmerists employ the argument of 
poison to kill people. They cause you or your patients 
to suffer from arsenical poison in the blood or stomach, 
mercurial poison, morphine, or any other form of 
mineral, vegetable or animal poison which they may 
name in their arguments." Mr. Peabody says (173) 
she often taught her students that the malicious action 
of mind alone might, of itself, cause and had caused 
the pregnancy of women. A Christian Science healer 
(174), guilty of unpardonable impropriety with young 
women patients, when called to account by the girl's 
father, said that he could only account for his action 
on the ground that Mrs. Woodbury, an enemy, made 
him do it by malicious animal magnetism. A doctor, 
who for a year was a student in her college, says, 
and is willing to take an oath as to the truth of his 
statement, (181) that "I was taught that the postal 
clerks were so mesmerized that letters to and from 
the college would never reach their destination unless 
certain conditions were complied with; also that the 
telegraph operators were so under this malicious influ- 
ence that a message sent by telegraph would not reach 
the person to whom it was sent unless certain precau- 



OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 155 

tions were taken ;" and he tells of one instance where 
she sent him to West Newton to forward a telegram 
to Chicago, so that it would go by way of Worcester 
instead of Boston, because the Boston operators were 
supposed to be mesmerized. He said, "We were 
taught that they (her enemies) had killed several 
students of Mrs. Eddy. I was taught that Kennedy 
and Arnes knew how to treat people in a way to cause 
sixty symptoms of arsenical poison." Some may re- 
member the suicide in Boston a few years ago, 1907, 
of a Miss Mary C. Tomlinson. ( 191.) She was a lead- 
ing Christian Scientist of Boston and one of Mrs. 
Eddy's closest friends and most faithful followers. 
After the lawsuit by Mrs. Eddy's son and her adopted 
son to secure part of her property, she instructed 
Miss Tomlinson to treat her, Mrs. Eddy's, own son, 
together with his lawyer, by sending arsenical poison 
into their veins, or otherwise putting them to death. 
Miss Tomlinson was shocked beyond words to express. 
Her eyes were opened to the enormity of the crime 
to be practised in the name of the church of Christ. 
Her whole nature revolted against it, and with chagrin 
and horror and remorse her mind became temporarily 
unbalanced. She threw herself out of a hotel window 
and ended her life. One of her brothers said to the 
other as they stood over her dead body, "Irving, the 
blood of our sister is upon the skirts of Mrs. Eddy." 
Mrs. Eddy (171) in an article entitled, "Malicious 



i 5 6 RELIGIOUS TEACHINGS 

Animal Magnetism/' published by her in the Chris- 
tian Science Journal for February, 1889, says, "One 
of the greatest crimes practiced in, or known to the 
ages is mental assassination." After saying that "this 
mind, by misusing its freedom, reaches the degree of 
total moral depravity" she further says, "Does the 
community know this criminal? He sits at the 
friendly board and fireside; he goes to their places 
of worship; he takes his victim by the hand, and all 
the time claims the power and carries the will to stab 
to the heart, to take character and life from his friend 
who gives him his hand in full trust." And then 
in concluding the article she says, "The time has come 
for instructing human justice so that these secret 
criminals shall tremble before the omnipotent finger 
that points them out to the human executioner." In 
other words, she would bring in again the days of the 
Salem witchcraft and would invoke the laws of the 
land to prosecute and, if possible, to execute upon 
the gallows the ones that the omnipotent finger, which 
in reality would be herself and her followers, pointed 
out as the mental criminals. She actually caused a 
suit in equity to be brought in the Superior Court of 
Salem, Massachusetts, against her enemy Spofford, 
in which she asked the court to issue an injunction 
restraining him from using his mind to cause the ill- 
ness of her patients. 

What a reign of terror, what a reign of the most 



OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 157 

diabolical witchcraft, what a reign of legalized 
murder, would have been injected into the life of 
this country if Mrs. Eddy and her followers could 
have had their way in the courts; and how easy it 
would have been for them to get rid of their enemies 
once and for all could they have got legal sanction 
to this diabolical theory. Can the reader as an in- 
telligent American citizen, or as a professed follower 
of Jesus Christ, give his sanction to a religion or a 
philosophy that teaches such a doctrine as this ? 



158 RELIGIOUS TEACHINGS 



CHAPTER VIII 

HOW ACCOUNT FOR ITS NUMEROUS FOL- 
LOWERS—THEIR GOOD LIVES, IN- 
TELLIGENCE? 

No doubt the question will arise in many minds, 
If all that has been said about Christian Science doc- 
trine and teaching in this book be true, how can one 
account for the large number of people who have 
gone into it and are still going into it, most of them 
splendid, moral, and Christian people, and many of 
them intelligent, educated people? How account for 
the rapid growth and spread of Christian Science? 
Is it reasonable to suppose that so many good, in- 
telligent people would go into it if its teachings were 
at all as here represented? Is this not a proof that 
the statements of this book are wrong and that after 
all Christian Science is right? No, by no means. 
There are sufficient and abundant reasons to account 
for the rapid growth of Christian Science and for 
the character of the people that have gone into it 
even though everything that has been written in this 
book, and more, is true. 

As was said in the beginning, the great mass of 



OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 159 

people who take up Christian Science do not know 
anything about its fundamental teachings. They have 
never attempted to read through Mrs. Eddy's book nor 
to find out first hand what she does teach. The author 
has personally asked scores of them and never with 
but one exception has he found one who has. They 
have talked with people and people have talked with 
them about what Christian Science is and what it 
teaches and how it helps people physically and reli- 
giously. They have listened to some of the beautiful 
teachings that Christian Science has tacked on to the 
outside of its system, but they have never tried, first 
hand, to find out what Mrs. Eddy does really teach 
in her book. They may have read parts of her book, 
some pages here and there, but mostly they have read 
papers and pamphlets and lectures especially prepared 
to capture the public, and which do not give the real 
fundamental teachings of Christian Science, or, if 
they do, give them so veiled and covered that the 
ordinary reader cannot detect them. These people 
are mostly good, sincere, earnest people who are won 
by the healing claims of Christian Science. As repre- 
sented to them, it seems very sane and very Christian, 
and they accept it as thus represented, without really 
investigating to find out its true nature. 

Another class of people which is easily captured by 
Christian Science teaching is the class of people who 
have, for longer or shorter periods of time, been mem- 



160 RELIGIOUS TEACHINGS 

bers of the various Christian churches, but whose 
Christian lives and whose church membership have 
meant almost nothing to them. They seldom have 
gone to church and they have had almost nothing to 
do with it. They have contributed very little to its 
support either by sympathy or service or financial aid. 
In fact, many of them have for some reason or 
other become more or less disgruntled with the church. 
They have not read their Bibles; they have not lived 
lives of prayer either in their secret lives, in their 
families, or in the church. Of course, their Christian 
lives have brought little or no satisfaction to them. 
They are thus held to the church and to the Christian 
life by a very slender thread which is easily broken. 
These people are readily impressed when they listen 
to or read the beautiful outside ethical teachings of 
Christian Science. They seem entirely new to them 
and they think they are exclusively Christian Science 
teachings. They see the Christian Science people 
reading their Bibles, reading their Christian Science 
text-book, and going through a form of prayer, and 
it all seems so different from what they have done 
or have been used to in their own lives that they be- 
come very enthusiastic and think Christian Science 
people are the only really religious people in the world. 
But these persons do not know and never will know 
the first principles of real Christian Science doctrine. 
They did not read their Bibles to know what was 



OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 161 

taught there, they did not do anything but skim over 
the surface when they were in the Christian churches, 
and they need not be expected to do differently after 
they take up Christian Science. The fact is, these 
people never get any deeper, and never will get any 
deeper, into Christian Science teaching and doctrine 
than its beautiful outside moral and ethical precepts. 
They do not know its fundamental teachings, and in 
fact, they do not care to know them. 

Again, every student of humanity knows that many 
people may be very intelligent in ordinary matters, may 
be shrewd in business, may be able to speak several lan- 
guages, may be graduates of college, and may know 
how to reason out problems in mathematics, and yet 
when it comes to matters of religion or of logical 
philosophical reasoning they are almost utterly im- 
potent. It is doubtful if one Christian Scientist in a 
thousand has read or can read Mrs. Eddy's book and 
get any logical sense or meaning out of it, or can 
show from her book what her real fundamental teach- 
ings are in any consistent or logical statement of them. 
And that is not because they are uneducated or unin- 
tellectual people, but because in matters of religious 
belief and in matters of philosophical thinking they 
have not schooled or trained themselves to think 
clearly or logically. There has never yet been a reli- 
gious pretender, a second Elijah, a reincarnated Jesus 
who could not and who did not obtain a following 



162 RELIGIOUS TEACHINGS 

of intelligent people. There are thousands of college 
graduates, followers of Joseph Smith and Mormonism, 
but that does not argue that their teachings are sane 
or reasonable or true. Alexander Dowie had many 
of the most cultured, refined, best educated people 
among his followers, people of wealth and influence 
and of good common sense on all other matters, who 
accepted his claims and actually believed that he was 
a reincarnation of the prophet Elijah. Macaulay, the 
historian, writes of Joanna Southcott, who appeared 
in Great Britain early in the nineteenth century: "We 
have seen an old woman with no talents beyond the 
cunning of a fortune-teller, and with the education 
of a scullion, exalted into a prophetess and surrounded 
by tens of thousands of devoted followers, many of 
whom were, in station and in knowledge, immeasur- 
ably her superiors ; and all this in the nineteenth cen- 
tury and all this in London." This woman claimed 
that she was destined to be the mother of the Messiah. 
She got a cradle and a fraudulent baby and claimed 
this baby was the Messiah born to her. And as 
Macaulay says, thousands of intelligent people be- 
lieved her and became her followers. 

There are undoubtedly some unreasoning people 
everywhere, like those Londoners; people who in the 
ordinary- affairs of life are seemingly normal intellect- 
ually, and yet who have a propensity for swallowing 
the most monstrous absurdities if only they are clothed 



OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 163 

with a semblance of religion; people who will pros- 
trate their common sense, their reason, their intellect- 
uality before the coarsest and most shameless vulgar- 
ity and fraud if only it claims to be religious. People 
will wear all sorts of outlandish dresses, men will 
let their hair grow long like women, some people will 
go without any clothes at all, some will even mutilate 
their bodies and do many other foolish things if only 
they have the name of religion back of them. These 
are facts known to every student of history. 

Again, there are a great many slightly educated 
people, people with a little smattering of learning, 
some of them have even gone to college, who like to 
appear very intellectual. They pride themselves that 
they are very broad, very liberal, and very progres- 
sive in their views. They look with somewhat of pity 
if not almost of scorn upon people who hold to the 
old ideas and theories of life, and call them narrow- 
minded, unintellectual, unprogressive, and "old- 
fogyish." To these people anything that professes 
to be, and appears on the surface to be, scientific or 
philosophic or advanced in thought appeals, no matter 
how unscientific or how unphilosophic or even how 
insane it may be in its real fundamental teachings. 
These people are easily won by a few catch words, 
such as "scientific," "philosophic," "liberal," "broad- 
minded," "progressive," "advanced thought," "new 
thought," "modern views," "up-to-date ideas," and 



164 RELIGIOUS TEACHINGS 

especially if these words and phrases are spoken with 
a decidedly New England accent. Christian Scien- 
tists have learned to use this bait with great and tell- 
ing effect. They know that a great many people can 
be scared into swallowing almost anything, simply by 
calling them "narrow" or "unprogressive" if they do 
not. When this advanced, progressive, intellectual 
movement is worked up into a social fad in a com- 
munity it becomes absolutely irresistible to all these 
superficial "would be's," and thus not only wins them 
but also gives them the atmosphere where they can 
move with perfect grace and ease. 

No doubt the selfish easy life that Christian Science 
doctrine offers is attractive to some people. A reli- 
gion that teaches that there is no hell, no penalty, or 
suffering for sin here or hereafter, in fact, that teaches 
that there is no sin, that nothing is sinful or wrong; 
a religion that makes no restrictions, that imposes no 
restraints upon conduct, that allows people full rein 
to all their desires and passions; a religion that says 
there is no hereafter to this mortal sinning man, that 
there is no need of repentance or of forgiveness — 
such a religion as this, of course, is very comforting 
to all selfish, pleasure-loving, worldly-minded people. 
If there are no sick people in the world, if there are 
no blind or deaf or aged or poor or orphans, if there 
are no heathen to be lost or saved, if there are no 
moral wrecks in our slums, then, of course, there will 



OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 165 

be no calls for charity, no appeals for hospitals, or 
for almshouses or for orphanages or for homes for 
the aged, no appeals for the giving to missionary work 
at home or abroad. How nice and easy and com- 
forting it all is. How it appeals to one's selfish nature. 
No responsibility for anyone — no self-sacrifice for the 
sake of suffering or needy humanity. Every dollar 
one makes just to be spent upon himself and family, 
upon his own selfish desires and pleasures. No visit- 
ing the sick, no giving out of sympathy to those in 
trouble or in sorrow. Surely such a doctrine does 
appeal to every selfish instinct of the human nature. 
It promises health no matter how sinfully one lives, 
no matter how much one violates the laws of health. 
It promises wealth and worldly prosperity to all its 
followers, and says that it is observable that Christian 
Science people are almost always more prosperous 
than those not Christian Scientists. It offers social 
standing. It takes off all restrictions and restraints 
from conduct except those imposed by human law and 
moral decency. It says God is good and therefore 
everything is good, so enjoy life to the full. No 
wonder many people are glad to find a religion that 
does so completely sanction and approve all the selfish 
impulses of their natures. This selfish appeal, no 
doubt, has won and will continue to win many fol- 
lowers. 

One other thing which must not be forgotten, and 



166 RELIGIOUS TEACHINGS 

which has materially aided in the rapid growth and 
advancement of Christian Science, is the commercial 
side of it. Earlier it was shown how Mrs. Eddy made 
a big fortune of several millions of dollars out of it. 
She also trained a number of leaders, healers, prac- 
titioners, and lecturers who have gone out to train 
other leaders, healers, practitioners, and lecturers, and 
they in turn to train still others. These people make 
their livelihood by treating patients at so much per 
treatment, by giving Christian Science lectures, by 
teaching and training other healers and practitioners 
and by selling Christian Science literature. Of course, 
as in any other business, the more people they can get 
to treat and to train, the larger will be their income 
and their bank deposits. So from top to bottom they 
are anxious to have as many people take up Christian 
Science as possible. Hence they have their agents 
constantly at work. Their advertising literature, 
papers, pamphlets, newspaper articles, lectures, etc., 
are placed in the hands of everyone that is sick where 
there is the least possibility of getting a new patient 
for a practitioner. These papers, pamphlets, etc., are 
also sent through the mails, left at the doors or are 
handed out personally to everyone, sick or well, where 
there is any hope, immediate or future, of gaining a 
new convert. When a great army of practitioners 
have their living at stake, when dollars and cents are 
looming out before them, no wonder they are untiring 



OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 167 

in their efforts personally, through every Christian 
Science person that they can get to work for them, 
and through their literature that they are constantly 
putting into the homes of people everywhere; for 
every new convert means added dollars to the prac- 
titioner. Of course, they are going to make Chris- 
tian Science appeal to people just as strongly as they 
can, and hence, in their appeals to Christian people 
they are going to make it seem just as Christian as 
they possibly can. Some one has said, "There are 
no other proselyters like the Christian Scientists, for 
there is no other religion that is at the same time a 
source of such large revenue to its promoters." 

But let no one be deceived into thinking that just 
because so many good and intelligent people have 
gone into Christian Science and are going into it 
therefore it is all right and perfectly sane and 
Christian. Jesus said, "Beware of false prophets 
that come to you in sheep's clothing but inwardly are 
ravening wolves." He said, "Wide is the gate, and 
broad is the way, that leadeth to destruction, and many 
there be which go in thereat." Note the following 
words of the Apostle Peter and see how wonderfully 
he foretold the coming of just such a movement as 
this: "There shall be false teachers among you, who 
privily shall bring in damnable heresies, even denying 
the Lord that bought them . . . and many shall 
follow their pernicious ways . . . and through covet- 



168 RELIGIOUS TEACHINGS 

ousness shall they with feigned words make mer- 
chandise of you;" and then he concluded by saying, 
"whose judgment now of a long time lingereth not, 
and their damnation slumbereth not." Jesus told his 
disciples to be on the lookout for just such pretended 
Christian movements and not to be deceived by them 
when they came. He said, "For there shall arise false 
Christs, and false prophets, and shall show great signs 
and wonders, insomuch that, if it were possible, they 
shall deceive the very elect," and "many false prophets 
shall arise and shall deceive many." Paul warned 
his followers, and said to them, "For such are false 
apostles, deceitful workers, transforming themselves 
into the apostles of Christ. And no marvel ; for Satan 
himself is transformed into an angel of light. There- 
fore, it is no great thing if his ministers also be trans- 
formed as the ministers of righteousness, whose end 
shall be according to their works." John also warned 
his followers and, with a foresight that was surely 
divinely inspired, he wrote, "Beloved, believe not 
every spirit, but try the spirits whether they be of 
God, because many false prophets are gone out into 
the world. Whereby know ye the spirit of God: 
Every spirit that confesseth that Jesus Christ is come 
in the flesh, is of God; and every spirit that confesseth 
not that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh, is not of 
God, and this is that spirit of antichrist, whereof ye 
have heard that it should come." Jesus Christ and 



OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 169 

the inspired writers foresaw the coming of these 
deceptive, pretended revivals of early Christianity, 
foresaw the susceptibility of mankind, foresaw that 
unless they were admonished and forewarned many 
even of the earnest Christians would be deceived and 
led astray by these false pretenders, and hence, to 
prepare and shield them, sounded these solemn words 
of warning. And never, since the time when Jesus 
was here upon the earth, were these words of warn- 
ing more needed than they are needed to-day. 

Before leaving this chapter a word ought to be said 
in regard to the permanence, the durability of the 
Christian Science church. The question has often 
arisen, How long will Christian Science last? Its 
friends, of course, claim that it is permanent; that it 
will go on increasing until it swallows up all the other 
churches; that Protestant, Catholic, Jew, Moham- 
medan, Confucianist, can and will all unite in the 
Christian Science church; and that Christian Science 
is to be the final religion of the world. On the other 
hand many who are outside the fold have for years 
been predicting its early downfall. They have said, 
do not speak against it, do not fight it, let it alone 
and it will soon die of itself. But it has not died. 
Some have said it would not outlast the life of Mrs. 
Eddy, that as soon as she died it would immediately 
collapse. But she has been dead several years and it 
js still here and is still growing. Christian people 



i;o RELIGIOUS TEACHINGS 

need not deceive themselves. A movement of this 
nature, that appeals to so many different types of 
people; a movement that unites promised physical 
healing, social standing, and financial prosperity with 
an easy and popular religious mode of living under 
the name of Christian; and then puts behind it all 
as a driving motive power a great army of ever active 
aggressive emissaries, actuated by the motive and 
spirit of financial gain — a movement of such a charac- 
ter is not likely to die easily or quickly. People, 
seventy-five years ago, said Mormonism would soon 
die, that it could not live and flourish in a civilized 
and Christian country like America, but it has not 
died and its numbers are ever increasing. So will it 
be with Christian Science unless the Christian people 
everywhere awake to its danger and intelligently and 
earnestly strive to thwart it. 

There are two things that Christian Scientists al- 
ways welcome : one is, unreasoning and bitter persecu- 
tion. Christian Science always thrives under that. It 
only advertises their religion and strengthens their 
claim that they are broad-minded and progressive 
while the people who persecute them are narrow and 
prejudiced. It is true that sympathy always goes out 
to the persecuted whether they are right or whether 
they are wrong, and thus they grow the faster on 
account of it. Christian Scientists know this and so 
they welcome all unreasoning and prejudiced persecu- 



OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 171 

tion, and make the very most out of it that they can. 
The other thing that Christian Scientists welcome is 
to be left alone. When they are left alone they readily 
find plenty of good, earnest people whom they can 
convince and persuade and lead into their fold. They 
have been finding them for years and they will con- 
tinue to find them for years to come. The fields have 
been white for their harvest and they have been 
gathering in the grain. There is one thing, however, 
that Christian Scientists do not welcome, and that is, 
to have the light of intelligence and reason thrown 
upon their actual teachings and doctrines. Once let 
their fundamental teachings, their underlying motives, 
and their real practices be brought to the light so that 
the common people everywhere can see them as they 
actually are and the Christian Scientists will have 
hard work to get many of them to become their fol- 
lowers. They will undoubtedly get some. As Lin- 
coln said, some of the people can be fooled all the 
time. But a real campaign of education among the 
people, a putting forth of the actual fundamental 
teachings and beliefs of Christian Science as they are, 
and a showing of the logical, and necessary, and 
actual outcome of these teachings and beliefs in life, 
will do more to check the proselyting success of 
Christian Scientists than anything else that can be 
done. 



PART IV 

WAS THE LIFE AND SPIRIT OF THE 

FOUNDER OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 

IN HARMONY WITH THE LIFE 

AND SPIRIT OF JESUS 

CHRIST? 



CHAPTER I 
SHORT BIOGRAPHY OF MRS. EDDY 

It is a universally accepted fact that the tree and 
its fruit must correspond. Jesus asked, "Do men 
gather grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles?" The 
answer was self-evident. Then he said, "So every 
good tree bringeth forth good fruit; but a corrupt 
tree bringeth forth evil fruit. A good tree cannot 
bring forth evil fruit, neither can a corrupt tree bring 
forth good fruit." James asked, "Doth a fountain 
send forth at the same place sweet water and bitter ?" 
The answer here too was self-evident. If the water 
in the stream is bitter the fountain source must be 
polluted. No stream can be purer than its source. 
Christian Science doctrine and its fruitage are no ex- 
ception to this self-evident law. A study of the 
biography of the woman who was the author of these 
nonsensical, unchristian, and even blasphemous doc- 
trines and teachings will show that her personal life 
was just what might be expected of the author of 
them. 

It should be remembered in the beginning that we 
are not dealing with the life of a woman who lived 
175 



176 RELIGIOUS TEACHINGS 

in the far-off distant past, whose history and life are 
matters of legend. Mrs. Eddy has lived in our own 
day and in our own country. Many people who have 
known her practically all her life are still living. The 
statements recorded here have been made by the peo- 
ple who knew her intimately; they have been made 
over and over again publicly and in writing; many of 
them have been made under oath ; and the accuracy of 
not one of these statements has ever been disproved. 
Any intelligent person knows that such statements as 
these, made in writing, and made while Mrs. Eddy 
was still living, if they were not true would have been 
the basest criminal libel, and the ones who made them 
could easily have been sent to the penitentiary. The 
fact that neither Mrs. Eddy, a woman who rushed 
into the courts on every slight provocation, nor any of 
her followers, have ever disproved them, nor have 
they ever prosecuted the people who made them, is 
prima facie evidence of their truth. 

According to the sworn statements of her neigh- 
bors, given in McClure's Magazine, Mrs. Eddy was 
in her childhood so stubborn and self-willed and can- 
tankerous that no one could get along with her with- 
out letting her have her own way; was subject to 
hallucinations and fits which her doctor called 
"hysteria mingled with bad temper"; was so abso- 
lutely contrary that her own father said of her that 
Mary Magdalene had seven devils but his Mary had 



OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 177 

ten. Mrs. Eddy in after years could not get along 
with her own sister, but was locked and barred out 
of her house and was not even admitted to the house 
at her funeral. Mrs. Eddy, as has been intimated be- 
fore, was married three different times, once divorced 
on the ground of desertion (this is a matter of court 
record), thus making her on the authority of Jesus 
Christ an adulteress. It was said and put in public 
print, long before Mrs. Eddy died, that when she 
was first a widow, it was the custom of one John 
Varney, a hired man, to hold her in his lap and rock 
her to sleep at night. It is known that for years after 
the death of her last husband a man named Calvin A. 
Frye lived in her home as her private secretary and 
coachman and intimate associate, and if she were not 
married to him, as some thought she was, it would 
have been infinitely better for her reputation for 
chastity if she had been. 

When Mrs. Eddy was Mrs. Glover, in September, 
1844, her only child, a son, was born. So unnatural 
a mother was she, and so little did she care for her 
child, that almost from his infancy she had little or 
nothing to do with him. She would send him away for 
weeks to the house of the hired man, Varney, or to 
the home of Miss Sanborn, who had been a servant 
in her father's family. When Miss Sanborn married 
a Mr. Cheeney, Mrs. Eddy sent her son permanently 
to live with them while she was married again. In 



178 RELIGIOUS TEACHINGS 

the home of this servant he grew up, through no fault 
of his, in absolute ignorance, and until his dying day, 
then a man over seventy, could not even read or write. 
So little did she care for him or for his education 
that though she lived in the same town, North Groton, 
Massachusetts, for years, she seldom saw him and 
never did anything for him. 

Mrs. Eddy was always peevish and fretful, very 
irritable, and had a temper and an abundant allow- 
ance of hatred for anyone who incurred her displeas- 
ure. Because of her abuse of her husband and the 
violent outbursts of her temper she was often called 
by her neighbors in Lynn, Massachusetts, the "she 
devil." She was once heard to say of a woman whom 
she royally hated, "I'd like to tear her heart out and 
trample it under my feet." Mr. Peabody in his book, 
says, "Four years after her pretended selection by 
God for a divine mission, being denied the hospitality 
she had abused in the Wentworth household at 
Stoughton, Massachusetts, she left in a fury of pas- 
sion after having, with obvious intent, put live coals 
from her stove upon a heap of newspapers in the 
closet." Mr. Peabody is an eminent lawyer of Boston 
and well knows that such a statement if not true is 
the worst of criminal libel, and yet he wrote it and 
sent it broadcast years before her death, and she never 
attempted to prosecute him, though she hated him 
with all her soul. Mention has before been made of 



OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 179 

her attempts to kill, by "malicious animal magnetism," 
Mr. Spofford and Mr. Kennedy, two people whom she 
hated with all bitterness. And although one may 
laugh at the methods she employed, yet he cannot but 
realize that the hatred in her heart and the motive 
back of her attempt was just as murderous as though 
she had attempted their death by poison or by deadly 
weapons. 

Before starting her Christian Science cult it is a 
known fact that Mrs. Eddy for some time made a liv- 
ing in and about Boston as a spiritualist medium, 
where she gave public seances for money. It has been 
proven without any question of a doubt that much of 
her system of mental healing, which she says was a 
direct revelation to her from God, was in reality taken 
almost bodily from the teachings and manuscript of 
a man named Dr. P. P. Quinby, of whom she took 
treatments for a long time prior to beginning her cult. 
Of course, she revised and changed his teachings a 
great deal ; but anyone who will examine the teachings 
of Dr. Quinby and compare them with the teachings 
of Mrs. Eddy will readily see that his teachings form 
the basis for all of her system. 

It may seem to some that the author has been unfair 
in his treatment of Mrs. Eddy's life ; that he has given 
only one side, the worst, the selfish side. It may be 
asked, Was there no other side, was there no good 
side to her life ? Was she not generous and charitable, 



180 RELIGIOUS TEACHINGS 

a benefactor to the poor, at least, in her later life after 
she became wealthy? In answer to these questions 
the words of one who for years made a study of Mrs. 
Eddy's personal life, who published an article about 
her in McClure's Magazine while she was still living, 
and whose published statement has never yet been 
shown to be false, will be given. When asked why 
she did not incorporate such goods things as might be 
said of Mrs. Eddy, she replied that she had searched 
the whole of Mrs. Eddy's life for a kindly, a generous, 
an unselfish, a fine womanly deed, and would have 
been only too glad to have recorded it, but had not 
found one. Is that not a fearful indictment of the 
one who puts herself up as the equal of Jesus Christ 
— not one kindly, generous, unselfish, fine womanly 
deed in a long lifetime of more than eighty years? It 
is said on good authority that there is not a single 
charitable institution in this country founded by her. 
There is not the record of a single, noble, humanita- 
rian gift of even a dollar, given during her life time or 
left in her will, to the poor or to the suffering or to 
the unfortunate of humanity. She fleeced the gullible 
people of this country out of millions, lived in all 
the luxury and extravagance of a queen, and died 
without leaving a dollar of her money to uplift or to 
make the world better, unless the fostering of this 
selfish Christian Science propaganda can be so con- 
sidered. 



OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 181 



CHAPTER II 

SHOULD MRS. EDDY AND HER TEACHINGS 

BE SUBSTITUTED FOR JESUS CHRIST 

AND THE BIBLE? 

In conclusion may it be asked, are the Christian peo- 
ple willing to give up their personal, living, thinking, 
loving Jesus Christ, the pure and sinless Son of God 
and Son of Man, who went about everywhere doing 
good, healing the sick, opening the eyes of the blind, 
cleansing the lepers, raising the dead to life, and that 
freely, not for money; whose great heart was always 
filled with compassion for all suffering and sorrowing 
humanity; who himself suffered and died upon the 
cross to save man from his sins ; who promises to lead 
him through life, to be with him in death, and to 
give him eternal life at God's right hand in the here- 
after; are they willing to give up their personal 
Saviour and to take in his place a woman of the life 
and character of Mrs. Eddy? Are they willing to fol- 
low her teachings instead of those of Jesus Christ? 
Do they wish to believe all of this unreasonable and 
unlivable doctrine; do they wish to believe that the 
minds and souls and bodies of their dead fathers and 



182 RELIGIOUS TEACHINGS 

mothers and children were only myths, creations of 
the mortal mind, and that they have vanished forever 
into nothingness? Will such a doctrine bring any 
comfort, any consolation in the hour of sorrow? Are 
Christian people willing to surrender their Bible, that 
has been the guide and solace and comfort, not only 
of their own hearts and lives but of those of their 
parents and loved ones for years, and are they will- 
ing to put in its place or even to take as its inspired 
interpreter this book of confused nonsense, contra- 
dictions, and blasphemy? The Christian people must 
answer these questions for themselves. 

But in all earnestness let it be said that if one is 
going to take up this unchristian doctrine, which 
denies the personality of God, of Jesus Christ, and of 
the Holy Spirit ; which denies the redemption and the 
atonement and makes this pernicious doctrine to be 
the Holy Spirit ; and which denies almost every other 
tenet of the faith of our Christian churches; then let 
him not be hypocritical about it; let him not stay in 
the church and from inside strive to lead others 
astray. Let him not say to the world that he is a 
Methodist or a Baptist or a Presbyterian or an Epis- 
copalian and accept the benefits of that church, and 
then from inside the fold of that church that has 
helped to make him what he is, take advantage of his 
position to sow the seeds of a heresy that would de- 
stroy the very foundations of the church and of 



OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 183 

Christianity itself. Let him not from inside the fold 
use his influence to proselyte others to Christian 
Science and thus undermine and cripple the church 
that he has taken a solemn vow to support. That is 
the act of a traitor; that is the act of a Benedict 
Arnold, and he cannot afford to do it. If one is a 
Christian Scientist, if he really believes in it, and in- 
tends to aid in the propagation of Christian Science 
doctrine, then let him come out into the open, join the 
Christian Science church, and fight like a man. He 
ought not with one hand to accept the bounty of the 
church and with the other to send a dagger to her 
heart. 

What has been written in this book has been writ- 
ten in all kindness and yet in all earnestness. The 
author has had only one object in view and that has 
been to show the real fundamental doctrines and 
teachings of Christian Science and their logical and 
necessary ultimate outcome in life, and in this way 
to warn people of the danger in accepting these pro- 
fessedly Christian but wholly unchristian doctrines 
and teachings. 



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